by Kevin Burton
The NFL has just invited me, and you, to not watch football on TV. You want to be careful doing a thing like that.
It would appear that I can live without it.
This is a working hypothesis. Forgive me for not having it all thought out and laid out nice and tidy.
If you wanted to see the Chiefs-Dolphins playoff game Saturday, you had to pony up. You had to sign up for a streaming service called Peacock, for $5.99 a month.
The NFL was valued at $142.87 billion as of Sept. 12, according to en.as.com. The NFL and NBC, its $30 billion dollar television partner, asked you and me for the extra $5.99 to tide them over.
The game was not available on free TV, as all the games have been for years, or online on KSHB channel 41 in Kansas City, as someone on Facebook speculated.
NBC had the nerve to hype this “history” as if we were supposed to be breathless in anticipation.
My initial reaction to this corporate greed was unprintable and wouldn’t look so nice juxtaposed with some of my Sunday posts on Page 7.
But some of the related invitations I might extend to the NFL and NBC, though not possible in a strictly physical sense, may be possible in a metaphorical or even a metaphysical sense.
As gametime approached I told my wife Jeannette it was only $5.99 a month to get Peacock and if she wanted to sign up for it I was OK with that, but I would rather not.
I am legally blind. I’ve been watching life on the radio for years. But she is sighted, more visual.
As it turned out, according to her, we can’t sign up for it because our TV is too old. We watched Chiefs-Dolphins via the Kansas City Chiefs radio network.
And it wasn’t much of a game. Jeannette fell asleep. By the end, I was awake, though not in rapt attention.
But even had it been guaranteed to be a riveting game, such as the “13-seconds” Chiefs-Bills playoff game from 2021, the greed of the streaming-service grab would have turned me off. There was and is a principle involved.
I had one typically-Kev idea: to find out the sponsors for the telecast, list them, along with their major competitors and invite the world to hit them where it hurts, in the corporate pocketbook. The sponsors feel a little heat and mention to the networks that they should ix-nay on the streaming idea.
It’s a laughable notion, I know, to waste my time on such a drop-in-the-ocean scenario.
But the whole thing got me thinking, if I can do without Chiefs-Dolphins, can I do without other games?
=I was thinking, two games Sunday, two games Monday. So Jeannette has a rooting interest in Dallas, they are her second-favorite team as Kansas City is my second-favorite. What if we tune in Dallas/Green Bay Sunday and bag the rest?
That would free up at least ten hours, to do what? Go for a walk? Wait, it was 5 degrees out. Never mind that.
Well we didn’t end up skipping all the games, though we opted out of large parts Rams-Lions and Eagles-Buccaneers.
No, this tuning out would never be a case of me getting mad and swearing off the NFL. This would be more like NFL greed got me to realize there are other things I could be doing. Maybe instead of watching 100 game s a year I watch 30, or 25, and with the extra time, jump start my life.
We turned Chiefs-Dolphins into an event. We turned off the big lights, lit a candle and ate Jeannette’s chili with hot dogs and chips.
“This is fun, it’s like camping,” Jeannette said. And it was fun and it was free.
On Facebook and elsewhere I saw a lot of comments from other fans steamed by the NBC/NFL power play. No way they were going to pay to watch football.
And as for that $5.99 a month I didn’t give to Peacock, where else could I put that money that would make more sense? How about in a college fund for my granddaughter or somebody else? How about to a food bank?
Or I could just salt it away. But I will not be handing it over to multi-billionaires who never have enough.
I may wake up tomorrow feeling differently. Or maybe I would feel differently now had my Bengals made the playoffs. But right now the NFL greed playoffs hold for me, excitement equivalent to a touchback.
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