PARIS—Being a sports fan in the 21st century is sometimes frighteningly easy.
For instance, today I bought a subscription service from the NFL that will allow me to watch every minute of every game this season, streamed live and in high definition onto my computer. Just like that, I fork over a credit card number and type some personal information and click my mouse a couple times, and presto: for the next four months, I’m in football heaven.
This may not seem that exciting to anyone who hasn’t been in a deep coma during the past ten years of global technological advancement. But keep in mind that I live in a country with no NFL regular season coverage on public television, in a city more than 5000 kilometres from the continent where all but one of these NFL games will be played (on October 25, the New England Patriots will play a “road” game in London, England, against the poor Tampa Bay Bucs, who have to sacrifice one of their eight precious home games – though it doesn’t surprise me to see the NFL rigging its schedule to favour the golden-child Pats, I’m just glad to see that the New York Giants are playing a fair home-and-away slate, for once).
In fact, the only reason I’m allowed to sign up for this service, which the NFL calls its “Game Pass” and sells for US$239.99, is that I am not a resident of any of the following: the United States, Mexico, Canada, Bermuda, Antigua, the Bahamas, or any U.S. territories, possessions and commonwealths (including, as the digital literature helpfully points out, American Samoa, Guam, Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands). Yep, if you live in a place where they eat, sleep, breathe – heck, even understand – NFL football, you’re stuck tuning into CBS and NBC and FOX and ESPN to watch whichever handful of games is offered to you in a given week (typically five or so of a possible 16).
If you want to pause and rewind live game footage, or re-watch the games the next day with the commercials edited out, as the Game Pass allows me to do, you’ll need to shell out for a PVR. If you want to get ALL the games on your TV, and you live in the United States, you’ll have to slap a satellite dish on your roof (unless you live in Manhattan) and subscribe to DirecTV, which holds exclusive rights on the “Sunday Ticket” TV package. Fortunately for football-loving Canadians, the CRTC’s regulations forbid this sort of monopoly, and the package is available through no less than ten cable providers.
So starting tonight, when the Tennessee Titans travel to Heinz Field to open the 2009 season against Mlle. Trotter’s Pittsburgh Steelers (Mlle. Trotter has just informed me that she would like me to add “the defending Super Bowl champions” to the end of that phrase, which I’m absolutely not going to do), I’ll have every NFL game available at the click of a mouse. I’ve got a Super VGA video adapter that I run from my MacBook to a 20-inch television monitor (I do miss the 44-incher sitting in a storage unit in Toronto), a comfortable couch, and a Halal butcher down the street that sells unbelievably cheap chicken wings – the wing hasn’t yet caught on as a luxury food in France, and is still priced to clear. And I have a cupboard full of Frank’s Red Hot that’s just waiting to be turned into a mouth-watering Buffalo wing sauce.
Unfortunately, what we’ve managed to solve with technology in recent years has far surpassed our abilities to shift time or alter daylight hours. I’m still a slave to the system of standard time zones established a century-and-a-quarter ago by Canadian railroad surveyor Sir Stanford Fleming (immortalized in his very own Canadian Heritage Minute). So tonight’s 8:30pm kickoff in Pittsburgh is a 2:30am kickoff in Paris. Even on Sundays, the first slate of games, which I used to have to wake up for at 10:00am growing up in the Pacific Standard Time Zone of Vancouver Island, doesn’t start till 7pm in Paris. And if my experience with the Game Pass during the 2008 season taught me anything, it’s that there’s not much chance of keeping Mlle. Trotter awake to see the ending of the second “afternoon” set of games at around 1:30am, even if it is her Steelers playing.
So here’s how we’ve had to adjust our NFL fan experience in France. On Sunday mornings, over pancakes, Mlle. Trotter and I each make our picks against the spread for all 16 games (or less during a bye week), in a little running competition we try to keep up. Then we watch Sunday’s early game. Then on Monday, we agree to avoid all sports websites during the day, so as not to spoil the scores of the late games, and watch the NBC Sunday Night game over dinner – with the commercials kindly edited out by the good folks at NFL.com, the game flows wonderfully and flies by in around two hours. We do the same thing on Tuesday with the ESPN Monday Night game.
It’s not all bread and roses, of course – the price tag is pretty steep, and you have to shell out again once the playoffs roll around. But the best part of Game Pass? Easy. This practice of avoiding ESPN.com and SI.com and Sportsline.com, and most other web sites, actually (I’ve had games that I’d planned on watching ruined by spoilers on sites ranging from the New York Times to The Atlantic magazine) tends make me an unbelievably productive writer during football season. Isn’t technology wonderful?
* * * * *
The Sportstrotter’s 2009 NFL Predictions (playoff teams in italics)
AFC West
San Diego Chargers 11-5
Denver Broncos 6-10
Oakland Raiders 5-11
Kansas City Chiefs 3-13
AFC South
Houston Texans 12-4
Tennessee Titans 12-4
Indianapolis Colts 9-7
Jacksonville Jaguars 6-10
AFC North
Pittsburgh Steelers 12-4
Cincinnati Bengals 6-10
Baltimore Ravens 6-10
Cleveland Browns 3-13
AFC East
Miami Dolphins 11-5
New England Patriots 11-5
Buffalo Bills 9-7
New York Jets 4-12
NFC West
San Francisco 49ers 9-7
Seattle Seahawks 9-7
Arizona Cardinals 6-10
St Louis Rams 3-13
NFC South
New Orleans Saints 12-4
Atlanta Falcons 11-5
Tampa Bay Buccaneers 5-11
Carolina Panthers 5-11
NFC North
Green Bay Packers 14-2
Minnesota Vikings 8-8
Chicago Bears 8-8
Detroit Lions 3-13
NFC East
New York Giants 11-5
Washington Redskins 10-6
Philadelphia Eagles 9-7
Dallas Cowboys 7-9
Wild Card Playoffs
AFC: San Diego over New England, Tennessee over Miami
NFC: New York Giants over Washington, Atlanta over San Francisco
Divisional Playoffs
AFC: Pittsburgh over Tennessee, San Diego over Houston
NFC: Green Bay over Atlanta, New Orleans over New York
Conference Championships
AFC: San Diego over Pittsburgh
NFC: New Orleans over Green Bay
Super Bowl XLIV
New Orleans over San Diego
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