I love football. I hope I’ve made that abundantly clear by now.
And this is one of the best times of the year to be an NFL fan. It’s the start of the NFL playoffs. The regular season is over. The best teams have set themselves apart. And now, it’s time to see who is ready to make a championship run to the Super Bowl.
As an NFL fan, these next few weeks are often among the best. But this year, we encountered an unexpected complication. One of the biggest matchups of Wild Card Weekend, the Kansas City Chiefs and the Miami Dolphins, was not available to watch on standard broadcast or basic cable. Instead, fans had to use the Peacock streaming service to watch it.
Now, let me go on record as saying I fucking hate this.
Seriously, fuck the NFL for making this kind of bullshit deal. This isn’t some random regular season game, nor is this a streaming service that most people have. This is the goddamn playoffs! These are all national games that, for over 50 years, have been available to watch on basic broadcast and cable. It seems so simple, putting a major sports event on TV in a form where most people can watch it.
But this time, the NFL decided to fuck all those loyal fans over by essentially locking a playoff game behind a goddamn paywall. And this is after they recently repackaged NFL Sunday Ticket with YouTube TV for nearly $500! I know the NFL is the biggest sports league in America by a very wide margin. I also know football is the most popular sport by an even wider margin. But this is just bullshit greed taken to a whole new level.
And, given how the NFL seems to not give a damn about fan outrage, I have a feeling this won’t be the last time. Peacock, which is owned by NBC Universal, paid the NFL a lot of money to stream that game exclusively. They don’t care if it pisses off fans. They just care if it gives them a small uptick in subscribers. And because fans have little power in wake of all that money, this is going to set a bullshit precedent that nobody outside executives likes.
Even though the outrage even drew ire from congressmen, I don’t know if that will change anything. I just know that, if this bullshit deal made both sides extra money, then they’re going to do it again and it won’t matter how pissed off fans are. That’s just the world we live in.
So, in wake of this level of hopelessness, I just want to say one more time fuck the NFL! Fuck NBC Universal! And fuck Peacock!







