Enough with the Patriots

I realize that the Patriots are about to go undefeated and it's historical and might never happen again in my lifetime. However, with how much the every media entity in the sports world has been ending over backwards to tack on more superlatives than the next guy, I think at this point I'm happy that his will never happen again in my life. One commercial said "There's only one question left for NFL fans this season - can the Patriots remain perfect?" I think fans in Tennessee, Cleveland, Washington, Minnesota and New Orleans have a couple of questions, too, but evidently they aren't real NFL fans.

I was going to post earlier about the NFL Network "letting" NBC and CBS carry the game tonight. Evidently because everybody wants to see this. Really? I'm pretty sure everybody wanted to see Packers-Cowboys, but the NFL didn't care about that. And of course the NFL Network has been showing Patriots games for the past 24 hours straight. Again, I kind of get that - it's their product, they should be doing eveything to hype that.

But here I am watching the Alamo Bowl right now on ESPN. ESPN is NOT carrying the Patriots game. They had the option to, but would only do it if they could provide their own announcers. Cause, you know, Ron Jaworski can announce circles around Bryant Gumbel. So, ESPN is not showing what I'm sure will shortly be dubbed the game of the century and is instead showing the Alamo Bowl between the Penn State Notthepatriots and the Texas A&M Notthegiants. And the bottom line is about to blow a freaking fuse with all the updates it is giving from the NFL game. You knew it was going to get bad when the first update anounced that the Giants won the coin toss and would be receiving. In the last two minutes or so of the first quarter, I saw the following "Scoring Alerts" on the bottom line: NE 3rd and 14 at own 46, NE 1st and 10 at NYG 36, NE 2nd and 10 at NYG 17.

Then the Patriots scored a Touchdown and they did a Gamebreak - you know, where they usually break away to show a scoring play or something. Except on this Gamebreak, they couldn't show any highlights, so they just showed the standard Sportscenter score screen, the red one that shows the score and a couple of stats. Pretty much the same thing that's already on the bottom line.

I can't wait till my grandson's sitting on my knee someday and asking me if I remember the great unbeaten Patriots and I can tell him about the time I breathlessly watched the bottom line as Perfection ticked across my screen in red and black. My one question for ESPN is if they really want anyone to watch this game? I mean, it feels like they're just begging us to turn it away to a real game, the game they really want to be talking about. I remember the good old days when a network wouldn't even mention the name of another network. Now they are trying to say "Psst, what the hell are you watching this game for? There's a really good game on three of our competetior networks right now."

By the way, Penn State just rallied from a 14-0 deficit to tie up the game in the past five minutes. Hopefully I won't get arrested for watching the wrong game.