Wages of cosmopolitanism
It’s been a long time since I lived in a city whose football team I was a partisan of (and then it was the Lions, which will undermine your very capacity for sports partisanship). Now I live in the Bay Area, where two lousy teams block up the Sunday football spots on TV. Most poignantly, today sees this programming adjustment: National Fox broadcast – Giants (5-1) vs. Steelers (5-1); Regional Fox broadcast – Seahawks (1-5) vs. Forty-Niners (2-5). I’m sure there are people in the area who would prefer to see the latter game. But my years of abstract dwelling in the cosmopolis leave me completely unable to sympathize with such rubes and hayseeds.
Interesting. I live in Pittsburgh, and think I would’ve preferred to avoid watching the Steelers during that fourth quarter. Does that make me a cosmopolitan?
— Justin · Oct 26, 11:36 PM · #
It’s not often you hear the good people of San Francisco called hayseeds in comparison with the gun-clingers of Pennsylvania.
— Patrick · Oct 27, 01:57 PM · #
The NFL’s broadcast contract structure is simply infuriating. Broadcast networks like their near-monopoly, so the NFL is afraid of giving extended rights to cable. But they can’t entirely ignore the market for national games, so they cut an exclusive deal with DirecTV.
Being an NFL nut, I pay and pay through the nose for Sunday Ticket on DirecTV, with added extortion for HD broadcasts. It’s worth it, but I look forward to the day when you can get Sunday Ticket through cable as well, if only so that competition will bring the price down.
— Patrick Kaze · Oct 27, 09:47 PM · #