I’m not a big fan of the NFL. Or as they love to call it, the National Football League. There are plenty of reasons why:
1. My wife’s family has indoctrinated me quite effectively to love College Football. Hence, fall Saturdays are spent watching Ohio State, Penn State, and many of the other marquee match-ups that are available across several channels on TV. We even end up watching something like last night’s clash between San Jose State and Louisiana Tech, just for the heck of it. The point here is simple: we spent all of Saturday watching football…and we’re supposed to spend Sunday doing the same thing?
2. Unlike College Football, where you can reasonably expect to see almost every big game every week if you have the sports package on your cable subscription, the NFL will only give you about a third of their games, unless you switch to DirecTV and pay for the additional Sunday Ticket package to watch all the NFL games. One of the few games you’ll see will involve your local team, or whatever team is closest to where you live. Because of this, you end up missing a lot of big games, and if your local team stinks, one significant portion of your pro football coverage will suck.
3. NFL games are long. So very long. They never end. There’s a ton of stoppage in play, there are endless commercials and time outs, and you almost feel forced to look at your laptop and start doing something else. Plus, you only get one other game to switch to, so it’s not like you have a ton of options when you’re being assaulted with endless promos of bad beer and huge pickup trucks.
4. I’m a born contrarian, and since everybody and their mother seems to love the NFL, I naturally feel some sort of aversion towards it.
I could go on and on. But I’ll tell you something about the NFL that I really like. No, that’s an understatement: there is something about the NFL that I absolutely love: the NFL Red Zone channel.
What is this channel? A simple, beautiful idea. Here’s how it works:
Except for two games (one on Thursday night, one on Monday night), the NFL takes over Sundays in the United States. There’s a big slate of games starting at 1 pm Eastern Time, and another at 4:30 pm ET. Lastly, there’s a single Sunday night game. This means that you have a ton of games going on at the same time between 1 pm and around 8:00 pm every Sunday. The problem is, you only get a maximum of two 1 pm games, and a max of two 4:30 pm games unless you’re a DirecTV customer. So, you’re missing a ton of action, particularly if the games you are assigned for both afternoon slots are bad games.
This is where the Red Zone channel comes in. The premise is simple: the channel will show you every single scoring opportunity that takes place when the a team enters the other teams last 20 yards. There are no blackouts: you will see every single score that takes place in an afternoon NFL game, no matter where you live, so long as you have this channel on your sports package (something that sounds a lot easier than it actually is – but that’s another story).
And it gets better: there are no commercials! NONE! You are fed seven straight hours of pure football action. Who is your guide? A man named Scott Hanson. If you follow that link, you’ll read about how fascinating the guy is. On screen, Hanson is unbelievable. He never takes a break, and always seems genuinely excited to take you from one game to another. Because of how hectic things can be, he frequently has to do the play-by-play of something that already happened so you can jump right in to live action with whoever is actually calling the game. He also fills you in on the context of whatever red zone drive you’re watching. As I type this, Hanson excitedly went to a clinching field goal in the Miami-Seattle game, to a third down play in the Indianapolis-Buffalo game, to a key turnover in the Pittsburgh-Cleveland game, to the last play of the Kansas City-Denver game. All in a span of a couple of minutes, with no hiccups and no missed action.
Again: no commercials. No annoying studio chatter. Just football. Isn’t this such a beautiful, simple idea?
Why can’t other sports have something like this? Wouldn’t it be great if we could have a special channel to serve this particular function for tennis during the Grand Slams? It could run through the first week, or until the quarterfinals. With so many matches going on, they could zoom you to a key 15-40 point, a tiebreaker, set points, and naturally, fifth sets. How great would it be to have that channel on during a hectic day at the US Open?
We know what we get as American tennis customers: ESPN doing their thing with a bloated studio lineup and loads of commercials, with the Tennis Channel doing a low budget version of the same thing. DirecTV lets you switch between a significant number of TV courts during Grand Slams…but again, you have to go and get DirecTV. Online, subscribers who get ESPN3 (a.k.a WatchESPN) can switch between many TV courts. But in either of these cases, the onus is on the viewer to do the switching, and you have to resign yourself to the fact that you will miss something important at some point.
Compare that to the relaxing experience that you get when you tune in to the Red Zone channel, where you don’t have to do a thing, and you’re seamlessly transported to every meaningful event that’s taking place around the league. The key element in this relationship between channel and viewer is trust: as a viewer, you know you won’t miss a thing, because the people behind the Red Zone channel will do their jobs and Scott Hanson will deliver.
On the other hand, whenever we tune in to ESPN2’s coverage of any given Grand Slam, one can’t relax and let them carry you through the day. Twitter will be going ballistic when someone is in a tense fifth set, but ESPN2’s cameras will be showing Federer or Serena dropping baked goods on some unfortunate qualifier. Or worse, you’ll be subjected to the studio personnel chatting up a storyline you’ve already read about 50 different times while there’s plenty of live action to show. And of course, you get the commercials.
Nobody associated with tennis seems to think that there is value in just showing the sport without any interruptions. Just tennis, all the time. Worst of all, nobody seems intent on building this relationship of trust between a channel and a viewer.
The NFL did see the value of giving their customers something like the Red Zone channel, and attracted a casual fan like me in the process. In related news, the NFL is insanely popular.
Can we dream of tennis learning from the NFL?
Interesting idea. I think the NFL Red Zone works because there are millions of fantasy football fanatics who want to see if “their” players are going to earn them points. Personally, I enjoy the drama of a full match and already get annoyed when we’re switched to a match that’s just about to complete, rather than allowing us to watch one full match in its entirety. Still, I see how others might like to see crucial points in several matches and so would be in favor of a “Red Zone” channel for tennis.
Thanks for that, Mikel. And I agree – the Fantasy Football/Gambling component can’t be ignored when talking about the Red Zone channel’s success. The key thing would be to have the Tennis Red Zone channel be an alternative venue for those who don’t want to miss anything that’s going on during a hectic day at a Slam. I don’t think people would like not having the option of focusing on a given match – NFL fans would riot if the only way to watch NFL games would be the Red Zone channel. And since we live in the age of five million channels on TV, why not add another?
Great read! Love the articles you guys are producing at The Changeover! The problem with ESPN’s tennis coverage largely stems from the country as a whole. In the hierarchy of sports in the United States, tennis is unfortunately towards the bottom. For this reason, when ESPN broadcasts the Grand Slams, it needs the game’s superstars to drive its ratings and keep viewers interested. More tennis-savvy nations like the majority of those in Europe would be more inclined to show a fifth set between let’s say Gasquet and Haas, rather than a snoozer featuring Fed or Serena. Not here. The USTA has the same $$$-driven mentality for their U.S. Open night sessions.
With that said, I’d flip over a RedZone channel for tennis, especially during the first week of the Slams. You’d probably need to pry me off the couch at some point but I guess there are worse problems 🙂
Thank you very much, Josh! We really appreciate the nice words.
And I agree with your points. What I don’t understand about ESPN/NBC/CBS is how obsessed they are with storylines and their own studio personnel. They actually believe we rather watch them talk to each other instead of hear them while we watch tennis. That’s the part that always drives me crazy. I guess the hope was that ESPN would carry their mainstream-oriented broadcast, and have the Tennis Channel be the home for the hardcores. The problem with that is that the Tennis Channel is obsessed with becoming an ESPN light – sometimes they even show the same matches at the same time!
Also, a Tennis Red Zone channel would be so hypnotic. It should come with a health warning.
I totally agree. They pile on the storylines way too much. I get that he’s carried the American torch for the past decade, but there are only so many times I can watch an Andy Roddick montage and listen to his retirement press conference over and over and over during the U.S. Open. Additionally, they tend to overload their focus on some issues and completely disregard others that are just as intriguing, like the Taylor Townsend v. USTA matter.
You’re very right. Their position is probably that not everybody is super tuned in to what is going on in tennis, so they feel the need to treat everybody as a casual viewer. What they don’t understand is that people have laptops, smartphones and tablets these days, so if they hear something they don’t know about, they can google it and get their answer at their own pace. In essence, ESPN treats people as if we lived in 1980.
About the Taylor Townsend affair, that was just a terrible way of dealing with a conflict of interest, since PMac is the head of that player development thing over at the USTA.