Are you ready for some football?

I know I mention this frequently in the fall, but on Sundays it’s one of the only things I think about: I miss football. I splurged on myself a few weeks ago and got the season pass for NFL.com’s “Field Pass” – live and archived radio coverage for the rest of the season. It’s totally worth it. I don’t have to rely on questionable streaming sites, and if I miss a game, I can listen to it at any point during the week. (I haven’t, yet, because there haven’t been any ‘can’t-miss’ games that I’ve missed. But I could if I wanted to.)

One of the complaints that people who don’t like American football have is that the play stops so often, usually for commercials and whatnot. It’s an argument that I agree with, but that doesn’t affect my enjoyment of the game. Part of it, for me, is that commercials have become such a part of the ‘football experience’ that I don’t even notice them when I’m watching a game live or listening to, say, B102.7 and Coyote coverage. Field Pass, though, doesn’t usually include the commercials – the Chargers station did a week ago, but most of them don’t. Most of the stations play music, an oddly familiar classical set that I can’t quite place, during the ad breaks. And there are a LOT of ad breaks. I knew there were a lot of ad breaks, but as long as there were ads – as long as there was speech and noise filling the airtime – I didn’t really notice them. When it’s music, especially music that isn’t intuitively football music, it’s really really obvious how much time of a football game is spent not playing football.

Also, dear NFL: can you PLEASE stop scheduling all the games that I want to follow (Pittsburgh, Minnesota, New Orleans, and Indianapolis are the main ones) at the exact same time? You have four game time slots throughout the weekend: early Sunday afternoon, late Sunday afternoon, Sunday night, and Monday night. There is no reason that all of the teams that I follow need to be playing at the exact same time. You are not making this easy for me. I’m not even complaining about the Sunday night and Monday night time slots because I know that my inability to listen live to those games is my own fault for living in this time zone. But seriously. Spread the games out on Sunday. Please. The way things are now, I have four games to keep track of in the early timeslot, and none that I really care about in the late one. Is the overloading of the early timeslot really necessary?