Getting under my pigskin

by Larry Bills, September 18th, 2006, 7:01 am

September is one of my favorite months of the year. Once the NBA Finals end in June, the sports fan in me goes into hibernation for a long three months as the airwaves are filled with that mind numbingly boring thing called baseball. As the calendar rolls out of August, the real national pastime — football — blasts out of the gate and my wife becomes a pigskin widow until after the Super Bowl.

As much as I love the NFL, I wish I didn’t hate NFL television coverage so much. Every year I hold out hope that this will be the season that the networks fire all the broadcasters that annoy me, cut the overproduced kickoff and half time specials, and just focus on the freakin’ football.

This season marks the beginning of several new broadcasting contracts, but alas, the new blood has brought nothing fresh to the table. CBS and FOX reupped with the league for about $8 billion, DIRECTV renewed its NFL Sunday Ticket package for $3.5 billion, NBC got back in the game for $600 million after a long hiatus, and Disney has moved the venerable Monday Night Football from ABC to sister network ESPN.

That’s a heck of a lot of money to toss around, and given the investment, the naive side of me hoped the networks would do more to reach out to fans and improve their football experience. But here’s the rub: Football fans are a captive audience. We have absolutely no choices when it comes to game coverage and the league doesn’t care, as long as it gets paid. Whatever the NFL tosses our way is what we are forced to take in. Period. It’s a monopoly in every sense of the word.

All aspects of the game fall into this take it or leave it mentality. Game coverage: Since I live in Texas, every Sunday I primarily get to watch the Dallas Cowboys (who I hate) or the Houston Texans (who I’d love to root for but they suck). Only with DIRECTV, which I don’t want, can I see any game I choose. Announcers: John Madden’s half-senile, unintentionally hilarious musings (”They lead the league in Johnsons,” he commented when referring to all the Cincinnati Bengals players named Johnson) to the mere presence on MNF of Joe Theismann, an utterly horrible broadcaster that football fans loath. Studio Crews: Just as bad as the announcers, especially the brutally unfunny Terry Bradshaw and cohorts on FOX.

Musical guests, though, are the most incomprehensible element of NFL coverage. I don’t know what marketing study convinces the NFL suits that performances (if lip synching counts as a, “performance”) by Diddy, Beyonce, and Rascal Flatts is the best way to kick off a season. That’s as ludicrous as Ashlee Simpson singing at the Rose Bowl a couple years back.

Of course, maybe I get too worked up about all this and should try to tune it out and just enjoy the game. I know it’s buried in there somewhere.