FOOL’S COLD
Goodell’s decisions not all about fans
WITH more than eight minutes left in Saturday’s VikingsPackers, NBC posted a graphic showing that four players had already been disabled. They were now, at the minimum, out of this game. And there were more injured to come.
But that stood to reason as, despite Roger Goodell’s claim that NFL decisions are “all about our fans,” the game was being played outdoors in zero-degree weather. Reader Allan Fredyn: “Had Goodell left his dog out on a night like that he could’ve been arrested.”
A game and night unfit for man or beast was scheduled back in April as per the understood demands of TV in exchange for money. Same with Saturday’s other NFL game, Colts at Ravens, which began, outdoors, at 4:30.
In April, the NFL figured these two games would be important and fea- ture at least two big-draw QBs, Aaron Rodgers and Andrew Luck. Rodgers, out with shoulder surgery since Oct. 15, was back but didn’t play because the Packers were eliminated. Luck, injured, hasn’t played all season for the now 3-12 Colts.
Regardless, such inhumane, scheduling never had to be.
Consider that both of Saturday’s visiting teams play in a domed stadium. So why weren’t these games scheduled to be played in Indy and Minneapolis?
Because the NFL works its schedule forwards — regularly opening the season with Super Bowl and conference championship teams in prime time — rather than backwards, cold weather to warm.
Thus, despite its unilateral ability to “flex” starting times, the NFL wound up with what it needlessly and cruelly did to players, coaches, sideline personnel, customers, vendors and many more, Saturday night in arctic Green Bay.
Rob Manfred’s MLB, in service to ESPN money, is similarly and counterproductively arrogant. It schedules cold climate games — New York, Boston, Chicago — for ESPN Late Sunday Night Baseball in early April. Let ’em all freeze, then arrive home at 1 or 2 a.m., Monday. Even if MLB invites — demands — diminishing patron returns and disgust, it clearly allows ESPN authority over its schedule.
Warm climate or domed stadia games could be the April Sunday night rule but taking fans for dopes with dough has become the conditioned reflex within MLB and the NFL.
TV now regularly allows us to witness diminished returns in every sport.
Saturday’s CBS Sports Classic, a top-flight, student-athletes doubleheader in New Orleans — Ohio St.-North Carolina, UCLA-Kentucky — was played to what appeared to be, at most, a half empty, 18,000-seat echo chamber.
Scores of vacant expensive courtside seats could not be hidden from constant view. And unless thousands bought tickets in order to watch on big screen TVs in the luxury restaurant, most lower-level seats went unsold, too.
And so sports continues to teach — force — its best customers to live without, many never to return.