NFL Pregame Excess

As a sports fan, I am also a big fan of Sundays during the fall. I like nothing more than to have already had a weekend full of social events so that I can sit down on the coach and feel totally wonderful about watching football all day. As a fantasy football owner, I’ve also been known to have my laptop (and my phone, and my ipad, and whatever other screens I can find) propped open so that I can simultaneously follow my fantasy football team and as many of the non-televised games as possible. I’ve tried the NFL Red Zone channel a few times. Red Zone is a term which refers to an offensive team having the ball within 20 yards of the end-zone they are trying to score in. The Red Zone channel flips back and forth between games to show the most exciting parts of all of them — it will even split your screen into three or four games at times. I find it to be a dangerously hyperactive experience that leaves me feeling sort of shaky and not like I’ve enjoyed watching sports at all. But I understand the appeal of the Red Zone channel.

What I don’t understand is the appeal of NFL pre-game shows, so I was really happy to read the recent New York Times survey of them by Richard Sandomir. In it he describes the growth of the Sunday morning NFL shows as an inevitable but ridiculous consequence of the NFL’s popularity^[1]

Starting Sunday, from 7 a.m. to 1 p.m. (all times Eastern), there will be 19 hours of pregame N.F.L.programming. Four of the new hours arrive courtesy of the CBS Sports Network, which is producing “That Other Pregame Show” next to the studio in Manhattan that is used by “The NFL Today,” the CBS broadcast network’s venerable pregame show. This flagrant addition of four hours, in one stroke, is excess piling on extravagance.

Keith Jackson, a retired legend of football broadcasting, was profiled recently in the LA Times by Chris Erskine. Erskine asked Jackson if he had any wisdom to impart on today’s broadcasters and Jackson replied, “They talk too damn much. You wear the audience out.” It’s likely Jackson was thinking about commentators during the game when he said that but I’d like to think he would feel the same about pre-game shows.

If there is one nice thing about all the NFL coverage and promotion, it’s that each channel has it’s own NFL theme song. These constants have become like Pavlovian conditional reflexes to me. They make me sprawl out, relax, maybe freak out a little about fantasy football, but mostly get ready to indulge myself in a day of sports. If you’re conditioned like I am, you might enjoy this inventive YouTube video by Ansel Wallenfang which I found on deadspin.com.