Like many American men, and more and more women, I watch a lot of football on Sunday. Not just any football, the NFL! I've noticed that it takes more than 3 hours to play a game. A game with 4 fifteen minute quarters! So for each game thet we watch, we are seeing 2 hours of stuff that we did not tune-in to see. Most of it is commercials. Now, I know the importance of commercials. They bring money to the commercial networks so they can afford to pay the NFL for the rights to carry the games. This is free enterprise at its best! Or is it?
The NFL has its own network, right? Many of us can't see it because our cable companies are too cheap to fork over the money to the NFL to carry the network. This is a side issue and it can take care of itself.
What the NFL should do is broadcast all of its games on it's own network. This eliminates the networks, who in this case are simply "middlemen." Therefore we can cut the commercial time within the football broadcast so that a game will last, say 2 1/2 hours instead of 3+ hours. Schedule two games a day, one at 6PM EST and the next at 8:30 or 9PM EST, Monday thru Friday. This makes 10 games during the week. The other six games would be broadcast as tripleheaders on Saturday & Sunday. This way it would be possible for NFL fans to see every game. The NFL makes more money - each game is nationally televised - and we don't have to watch reruns. So many people would be watching the NFL network on a daily basis that it could be made available to any cable company for little or no charge at all! As for the teams, with games being played every day, it might even be possible for teams to have more than 6 days to recuperate and prepare between games.
Like the idea, NFL? You can use it - for free. Well, OK, if you must compensate me, I'll settle for a sandwich to be named after me. Available at all NFL venues "The General Tom" - a toasted baloney and cheese sandwich. The way you guys charge for food you could easily get 8 bucks a pop!
