The NFL continued its never-ending campaign to stir up interest for NFL football in Europe this week with their second London game of the season between the L.A. Rams and the Giants. With this, the NFL shows yet again that they are doing everything they can to mismanage their product while still making money hand over fist.[embedit snippet=”jeff-ads”]
The league continues to miss the mark about what makes the NFL special: the ebb, the flow, the tension, the release. Teams play on Sunday afternoon in their home markets unless they get highlighted on the vaunted Sunday Night Football or Monday Night Football stages. Either way, there were four slots, two in primetime, and two of abject madness with multiple games going on at once. Then, it went away. NFL fans had all week to reflect on the game they just watched, and players had a chance to recover. It was special.
Now, there’s constant, and constantly terrible Thursday Night Football. And Saturday football when college football ends, and now, 6:30 AM football. Is this the new normal? Seven different time slots (Thursday, Saturday, four on Sunday and Monday night). There’s too much going on in too many nights. It doesn’t allow us the tension and release of an NFL campaign. Instead, we have product in our face constantly to decreasing results.
And now the Rams and the Giants go to London, another game that is proving to be a snoozer, as the Giants are still jet lagged and playing at a disadvantage after arriving two days ago. This is bad football, but Goodell doesn’t care. And this bad football? It’s being played literally before dawn in one of the team’s markets. I had to set the alarm to watch this nonsense. Roger Goodell doesn’t care about your home market or any market. He cares about London. He wants a London market team to be his legacy (sorry Roger, it’ll be your constant bungling of domestic violence and your bizarre insistence on random flags and fines) and he’s shown that he will do anything in his power to do it.
Anything in his power includes alienating the home market for the NFL’s new, bigger market in London. The newly minted or long-suffering LA Rams fans are getting their first bitter taste of Goodell’s NFL: too much everywhere with little regard for the product on the field and the fans in the seats. The NFL ripped the Rams from St. Louis, citing a lack of fan support, and their solution is to put it in LA and put a game on before sunrise in their new market. Roger, what is that? What are you doing?
The 6:30 AM home market game the Rams played shows exactly why the NFL is losing ratings. It’s too much terrible football that has little regard for the game or the fans. Get the NFL back to Sunday 10 AM Pacific through and Monday Night, and your ratings will skyrocket again. Stop with these extra timeslots. They’re pointless.
Roger, stop trying to make London happen, it’s not going to happen.