A Sunday of Ticket

Last Sunday I had the inestimable pleasure of spending my Sunday in a chair at a friend’s place watching NFL Sunday Ticket on a brand-new Sony HDTV. It was a blast. I don’t think I could do it every week, but if I had more time to spend on football, Sunday Ticket is a pretty sweet way to do it.

Sunday Ticket’s a DirecTV package that lets you watch every NFL game every Sunday. For some reason, the package is still subject to the NFL’s blackout regulations. So, for example, if you live near Oakland, as my friend does, and the team is unable to sell out its home game against the Broncos, as they were earlier this year, you don’t get to watch the game on TV. (Actually, he found it on some other channel, but you’re not supposed to have that option.)

Anyway, Sunday Ticket is mostly just a ton of channels that have NFL games on them. And that’s pretty awesome all by itself, because the NFL was made for television. (I mean, unless it’s the playoffs, aren’t games better at home?) Sunday Ticket adds more, like the Red Zone Channel, which jumps among games depending on what’s happening in them, but which strikes me as a pretty stupid way to watch football. There’s also a Game Mix Channel (possibly two channels according to some website, but we only watched one), which divides the screen into eighths and lets you watch eight games at once, or really seven and the Red Zone Channel.

What’s really cool is the sound: you can highlight any of the up-to-eight games that are on and play its audio, even while watching all these other games.

Sounds awesome, right? Unfortunately it misses on several counts. First, it doesn’t really divide the screen into eighths: there are eight boxes in a four-by-two arrangement, but there are always large swaths of gameless screen above and below the games. One is a constant sponsor’s logo, next to the huge “NFL GAMEMIX” in the center of the top of the screen. (Oh, that’s what I’m watching. Thought this was C-SPAN.) On the bottom’s a ticker. The problem is really one of geometry: you could make the game views taller, but not really any wider, so they’d be the wrong shape for the TV feeds anyway. Of course, you COULD divide the screen into quarters or ninths and they’d all be the right shape, and in the case of quarters much more watchable, but whatever. Another problem is that the screen always has eight squares divided, even if there aren’t eight games on. This leads us to our next issue, which is that the channel wasn’t even working right Sunday morning, because all the squares weren’t filled, but they also weren’t showing all the games. The final disappointment is performance: it’s very laggy switching between audio feeds and sometimes doesn’t seem to want to switch at all. It’s a weird thing to complain about: the setup is practically magic, and nothing on my TV comes even close, but it’s doesn’t seem like it should be much harder to do this well than it is to do it.

So, there’s my litany of complaints. So what. The experience of watching a ton of NFL action is just beyond compare. I got to see Vince Young, so beautifully back at the top of his game, go against the Dolphins, whose Chad Henne seems just awful. I got to see a similar mismatch as the Patriots took on the Buffalo Bills. The Eagles were taking care of the 49ers, which we barely watched because the other games were so much closer. It’s a weird phenomenon: if you’d had this in 2007, would you have watched any more than a few minutes of any Patriots game, or would they just be considered lame because they were blowing everyone out?

In the afternoon we focused primarily on the Denver-Oakland and Green Bay-Pittsburgh games, since my friend and I are Broncos fans and his girlfriend, who’s like the coolest person alive, is a Packers fan. Sadly both teams lost by one point. The Broncos game was fun: lasers, a guy losing his pants, and two near-brawls. Too bad it ended in unbelievable fashion as JaMarcus Russell took them down the field. (I thought the injury to Charlie Frye would’ve saved us.) Speaking of the Broncos, that 8-5 start followed by three losses last year is starting to feel awfully familiar. The Packers game was even worse, and gave me flashbacks to last year’s Super Bowl as Big Ben led a scoring drive in no time flat to pull out a win. I can’t wait to see him back in action in the playoffs, even if he screwed up our Sunday.

The nightcap of Minnesota-Carolina was fun to watch, and it just feels right to settle in to one single game at the end of the day.

What else changes with Sunday Ticket? Well, the highlights in postgame shows are superfluous and kind of funny, a reminder that some people just don’t have an NFL experience as nice as yours. Also, the “wait, why am I watching commercials?” feeling you sometimes get using a DVR is a million times worse when you’re missing live NFL games by not remoting fast enough, rather than just wasting a few minutes.

Anyway, Sunday Ticket is sweet. I don’t think I’ll ever have it, since I’d miss too many games being at church anyway, but if you’re gonna follow the NFL, there’s no better way.