Football season is upon us (as in, tomorrow!), and I totally forgot that I have no way to watch football this year!
My football watching has slowly been declining for years. With the kids, I don’t have time to watch football just to watch football, so my viewership was already down to basically just watching Packers games after the kids were in bed.
As if that weren’t enough, we got rid of cable, which meant I was missing a significant number of games. For example, I couldn’t watch any Packers games on Monday night, Thursday night, or any time they were playing at the same time as the Bears. We also downgraded to a tiny tv that was too small to see the scoreboard or time left on the clock.
As if THAT WEREN’T ENOUGH, if you recall, we lost our Tivo last year. At that point, we just got rid of our tv altogether. The experience was getting pretty shoddy to begin with, and who arranges their lives around the tv schedule anymore? If I can’t watch it when I want to, then I probably just won’t watch it. These days, we mostly watch Netflix on the tablet if we’re going to watch anything.
But what about football? I mean sure, I was missing a lot of games and all, but to not watch any at all?
I had some half-baked, cockamimi plan to get the tiny tv up and then buy a VCR from Goodwill and set that up to record. That used to be a thing, right? We used to do that? (Make sure you use SLP mode if you want to fit the whole game on one tape, kids!)
The advantage is that I think it would be a relatively cheap solution. I can’t justify getting cable (much less paying $250 for NFL Sunday Ticket) just for a couple of football games. Even so, this wasn’t the best solution in the world, since I would still have my tiny tv, and still miss all of those games (not to mention having to program a VCR every week).
Well, I think I have found my solution.
It turns out that the NFL offers something called Game Rewind, which allows you to watch every game after it is played. The cheapest package allows you to pick just one team (so you’d pick the Packers, natch) for only $30 for a whole year.
So not only does that allow me to see every game, even the Monday and Thursday games, commercial free (!) for only $30, it also allows me to watch them in HD on the tablet. Furthermore, they offer “condensed games”, that only show the part of the game from “snap to whistle”, cutting out all the commercials and commentary and reducing the game down to 30 minutes.
This has got to be the best value for your $30 ever.
The downside, of course, is that you can’t watch the games live. However, I already basically gave that up a long time ago. So this doesn’t seem like as big of a downside to me as it would have a few years ago, before I had kids.
Now I just have to decide if I’m going to continue trying to stay in a cone of silence until I watch the game, or if I’m just going to bite the bullet and see who won, knowing that it’s nearly impossible to prevent myself from knowing the outcome anyway.
Shane Halbach 