Friday, September 25, 2009

An open letter to the NFL re this Sunday's Jets, Giants games

I cannot believe you scheduled the Jets and Giants games for the same time -- 1 p.m. ET -- this Sunday. WTF?!

And don't give me the Yom Kippur excuse. I know Yom Kippur begins at sundown this Sunday, September 27, and goes until sundown Monday, September 28. For chrissakes, everyone (OK, almost everyone) knows that.

Hello?! Yom Kippur has been going on for over 5000 years! Get a calendar. Not like you can't Google "Yom Kippur" and find out when it occurs for, like, the next hundred years. But every time Yom Kippur falls on a Sunday, you guys (yeah, I'm talking to you NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell and/or whomever does the scheduling) manage to screw things up. And we New York Jets and Giants fans are fed up.

And why just reschedule the Jets (to the 1 p.m. slot)? What, there are no observant Jews in Buffalo, Seattle, Cincinnati, San Diego, or Phoenix? Are you kidding me?

I am very, very annoyed -- as, I am sure, are a lot of Jets and Giants fans.

And to those of you who say, "J., why don't you and the spouse just go to a sports bar to watch the games?" I would LOVE to go to a sports bar, but we have a kid, whom we can't leave alone for three or four hours. And I'm not sure it would be kosher to spend the Day of Atonement in a sports bar.

7 comments:

Anonymous said...

Bitter!

TommyMac71 said...

It's the Jets fault. They never Googled the big YK. As always the Giants were one step ahead of them.

3 solutions for you

1. DVR. The 21st century called, said you're late.

2. Picture in picture. Do we really care what Joe Buck/Kenny Albert/Dick Enberg thinks about the 3-4 versus the 4-3 anyway?

3. Grab the remote and man up. Jump from channel to channel. Obviously there is less than 60 minutes of real action in a football game but it takes 3 hours. This is easy, you can do it.

J. said...

@Anonymous: Damn straight.

@TommyMac71: 1. You must watch football LIVE. 2. We don't have picture-in-picture on any of our three TVs (as far as we know). 3. We actually have two cable jacks in the bedroom, and the spouse is seriously thinking of rigging up a second TV there so we can watch both games in HDTV, side by side. Hey, if John Madden can watch 18 games simultaneously, I can probably watch two. Maybe. Still, NOT ideal.

Dave S. said...

Are Giants and Jets games normally scheduled at different times? I did not know that.

If both games are being broadcast/cabled/beamed down to your house, do one of two Guy Things:

1) Switch back and forth and hope you don't miss good plays in the other game;

2) Haul another TV into the room and watch side by side. At halftime, switch seat positions AND games on the TV; if you have a CD of marching band music it would be especially festive.

I grew up, as you know, between Rochester and Syracuse, whose TV stations often showed different games. Using approach #1 I could watch up to four games in six hours.

Dave S. said...

Wow, you people type way too fast.

Dick Enberg? I remember when he was alive. Oh My!!!

J. said...

@Dave S. AND @Tommy, you guys really should meet. ; )

Anonymous said...

The Jets game was moved to 1pm at the request of the Jets whose fans complained the original 4 pm time.

ESPN chose not to make Yankees-Red Sox the Sunday night game after Yankee season ticket holders complained that an 8pm start would interfere with the holiday.

I know all this because I was once hired to answer phones on the Jewish holidays.