Life is really, really hard.
What is, or was, Times?
These days the networks pay enormous rights fees for the NFL. Dwarfs what they pay Macfarlane for his dreck.
I believe it was Timex, the watch company that sponsored the movie.
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Well, I just tell my Tivo brand DVR to add extra time to the end of the recording. As I did for this case. Seeing that show was airing in a slot right after Sunday football games, I padded it by an hour. This is a feature that is standard on my DVR, is it not on yours? And that is why I have a Tivo and not the cable company box.
Every fall we get the same grumbling about why don’t they schedule it this way or that. The answer is that the NFL is multi-billion dollar industry and it is THE programming FOX, CBS, NBC, and ESPN care about on those days when they are airing it.
Case in point, The Orville is airing on Sundays for two weeks only before moving to its regular day and time. <GASP> No, you won’t have to put up with this much longer. Of course, this is a science fiction show on Fox, so it will be cancelled by the third episode anyways. Regardless of its quality. I haven’t watched it yet, was finishing a season of the British Bakeoff from three years ago.
Thanks. Didn’t consider Timex. Only could come up witj Time Magazine or one of the many Xxxx Times newspapers.
It’s fairly evident that the point of the OP wasn’t to describe the situation as an insoluble problem, but to vent at being made to adjust to the whims of football’s special snowflakes.
Assuming that the OP cares to hear a rebuttal…
NFL games very, very rarely take more than 3 1/2 hours to complete, and it’s usually more like 3 hours to 3 1/4 hours. The major exception to this is the Super Bowl, which is more like 4+ hours, though that’s due to a longer-than-average halftime show, as well as an excessive amount of general hoopla.
It used to be (30 years ago or so) that a game would nearly always be completed in 3 hours or less. There are two big reasons why games last a little longer these days:
- More commercial time
- Teams pass more than they used to, and incomplete passes stop the clock
If a game goes to overtime, it’ll, of course, last longer. As overtime is “sudden death,” overtime can wind up only adding a few minutes to the overall length of a game (if, for example, the overtime kickoff is returned for a touchdown), or as much as a half-hour or more (if overtime takes most, or even all, of the additional 15-minute period).
The other thing that can add length to a game is injuries. If a player is seriously injured during a play (particularly if it’s a head or neck injury), it can take the medical team some time to get the player stabilized and transport them off the field. I’ve seen injury delays take 10 minutes or more.
And, finally, while it’s very uncommon, severe weather (i.e., severe thunderstorms) can force a game delay. They’ll play through rain, snow, fog, etc., but if there is severe lightning in the area, or tornadoes, they’ll clear the field and ask the fans to move to sheltered areas.
Given the sponsor, I guess starting on time was very important.
When I was a non-football-loving preteen, I was often pissed off when long-running games encroached on the local syndicated broadcast of Star Trek and I would hear that maddening announcement, “We now join our regularly-scheduled broadcast already in progress.” Far too often I’d miss the first five, ten or even twenty minutes of the show that way. Classic jock vs. nerd feud!
Only the first two episodes will air on Sunday nights; starting on 9/21, the show will air Thursdays at 9 Eastern, after Bat-Kid - er, Gotham.
Exactly. Who wants a history lesson of The NFL on Fox?
Up through 2000 or so, the late games of doubleheaders started at 4:05 Eastern. Fox assumed that games would run three hours, and scheduled new episodes of Futurama at 7:00 Eastern, only to discover that, pretty much every time, the NFL coverage would run until 7:15 or so (because when a game ends, Fox then cuts over to a game still in progress until all of its late games are done), and, in a few cases, ran past 7:30, resulting in the episode being pre-empted (and Fox having to dig up a repeat to air in the Pacific time zone three hours later).
Fox (and CBS, I think) asked that the late games be moved to 4:15 start times, and the NFL agreed, so Fox would not schedule anything at 7:00 on its doubleheader days. The problem was, more often than not, Fox’s coverage would run past 7:30, resulting in its 7:30 show - King of the Hill - being joined in progress out east. There are two notable examples: a Thanksgiving episode was shelved for an entire year because coverage ran until 8:00 that night (and Fox didn’t want to air a Thanksgiving episode after Thanksgiving - the same Fox that regularly aired Simpsons Halloween Specials in November, mind you), and a Christmas episode had only its last five minutes air (and, at first, Fox said, “Well, we aired it in its entirety out west, so we have no plans to air it again,” but so many people complained that Fox pulled a repeat of another Christmas special to air it again just before Christmas).
Eventually, Fox got tired of this, and decided to start its post-game show (The O.T.), which would fill the time slot until 8:00. At first, Fox aired repeats (and first-run episodes of 'Til Death that it wanted to burn off) in the west, but then decided to give the hour back to the local stations. There have been very few times when Fox’s coverage has gone past 8:00, even when the start times of the late games were moved to 4:25.
CBS, on the other hand, has gotten to the point where it sends out tweets saying that its NFL coverage has ended and 60 Minutes is about to start…
Back when I lived in Denver, the local station that carried Deep Space Nine also carried Colorado Rockies and Colorado Avalanche games. There was always a preemption of one kind of another.
The OP is basically this meme: http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_XgeYLAgHiyA/TNogaxTPM6I/AAAAAAAAAKs/yTF9P8mYGLw/s640/stop.jpg
I mean, I have empathy, as someone who similarly loathes football, but there’s a lot of butthurt in that, and the OP’s subsequent posts…
I hate…hate…hate football!!
You don’t get the point. You seem to think that football is a game played for its own sake, and TV provides coverage of it. Not so. TV exists for its own sake, has a voracious need for programs, and the NFL has a contract to provide the talent for some of them. Games begin when TV has a slot to fill, (six slots per week) and cues the players/actors.
Yabbut, football is only a game…
What they should do is schedule the games from 0200 - 0530. That way they’re only potentially preemptinhg infomercials. Also, the people going to the game aren’t jamming up the freeways for the regular people. Win-win, amiright?
Here’s a stupid question that people could probably clear up quickly for me. Why not pre-empt football for the show that’s scheduled? If there’s a weather delay, they would hold the game. So let the game keep going, filming it as it goes, edit in any commercials and commentary they like under no pressure, then show the tape after regularly scheduled program. People don’t mind staying up for hours to watch the end of a baseball game, so they’d be glad to see it – or would it be confusing to break the stream of the game like that? Are they afraid people seeing it live are going to spoil it for the home viewers? Or did we somehow promise absolutely live streamed football? Its…its probably that last one, isn’t it?
Generally speaking, sports broadcasts (at least of the major sports, on U.S. network TV) are only ever carried live. Yes, people will stay up late to watch the end of a late-running game…but that is still live. Once the game has actually occurred, you can go to any sports-news web site and see the result and the highlights…and the fact that the game itself then loses its immediacy will almost undoubtedly cost it viewership.
Also, parenthetically, Fox is, at this very minute, in a “Heidi” situation. Their “Game of the Week” (the 4:25 ET start game) between Dallas and Denver was delayed for an hour during the first quarter, due to a severe thunderstorm (incidentally, one of the causes for a very long game that I named earlier in the thread). It’s now 8:33pm, and they just had the 2-minue warning in the fourth quarter…thus, they’ve already run a half-hour past the original time slot (which was, itself, padded with a post-game show).
It’s an event that’s happening real time. For most people, they will lose interest if they know that the actual events have already passed and the result is known.
I’m not sure some people in this thread realize that live sports is what is keeping broadcast TV afloat. Scripted shows get streamed and/or pirated but you have to sit and watch TV to watch live sports. And also, as some TV exec once said (I forget who and I am paraphrasing): Sports is the perfect TV show because absolutely no one knows how it ends.