Dear ESPN/Disney: PLEASE Don’t Ruin NFL Redzone

I love football. I hope I’ve made that abundantly clear at this point. I’ve been watching football all my life and this is usually the time of year where my excitement for a new season reaches its apex.

In general, I try not get too caught up in the politics or media matters related to football. I know that’s not always possible. Simply following the NFL isn’t as simple as it used to be. The fact you need multiple streaming services to watch every game in a season is a frustrating trend that I do not like in the slightest. But my love of football still exceeds that frustration, so I’m willing to endure.

Now, there’s been another development on the media aspect of football. On August 5th, 2025, ESPN (which is owned by Disney) and the NFL entered into an agreement in which ESPN will acquire NFL Network and certain other media controlled by the NFL, including NFL RedZone. And it’s that last one that has me the most concerned.

I’ve noted before how much I love NFL Rezone. One of my favorite things to do during football season is sit down on my couch with a pizza and a beer on Sunday afternoon, turn on NFL Redzone, and watch seven straight hours of football with no commercials. No need to change the channel. No need to check in on every game to see if there’s been a major development. NFL Redzone does all that for me, courtesy of its wonderful host, Scott Hansen.

But I’ve seen what happens with these media deals before. It’s become a recurring pattern for over a decade now. A big media conglomerate, of which Disney is one of the biggest, takes control of a major asset. They claim they’re doing this in the name of consolidation and efficiency. But more often than not, it’s ends up accelerating a process called enshitification.

If you don’t know what that word is, you should definitely look it up. It explains a lot of what we observe in the modern media landscape. It describes the tendency of media to decline and degrade in quality, usually because a big company wants to squeeze out more profits to appease shareholders. It’s most prominently featured online, but this is something that happened before the internet. And while Disney isn’t the worst offender (that title belongs to HBO/Warner Brothers), they are pretty damn bad.

I’ve learned to adapt and tolerate enshitification in a lot of things. But I do not want that to happen to NFL Redzone. It’s one of the few things in this world that works perfectly because it avoids commercials and media degradation. It’s just all football for seven hours for 18 Sundays out of the year. If Disney does what Disney is best known to do, it’s only a matter of time before they try injecting commercials or sponsorships into Redzone in a way that degrades the product.

That would be the worst possible scenario and the worst target for enshitification. So to ESPN and their Disney overlords, I beg you on behalf of millions of NFL fans who already pay a ton of money to watch every game, including Redzone.

Please don’t ruin NFL Redzone.

Please resist the urge to enshitify the best thing we football fans have.

The world is already shitty enough. Just let us have this.