Does Fox Sports know anything about history? If so, you’d think they wouldn’t have switched local TV viewers away from the Redskins-Eagles game midway through the third quarter. Regardless, it doesn’t make sense.
The Eagles were beating the Redskins 24-0 so they thought they’d switch us to a “more competitive” game. First of all, Steelers and Lions fans weren’t sitting around hoping Fox Sports might switch to their game if the scheduled game got out of hand. Those fans either have DirecTV Sunday Ticket or they were at a sports bar watching the Lions at Steelers game.
Second, if people start watching a game, they want to finish watching the game. Otherwise, they would have the Red Zone station where they are switched from game to game depending on who is threatening to score.
Third, DirecTV did a study a couple of years ago where they found the most popular out-of-market team for each TV market. The team that was picked for the Triangle area? The Redskins. Therefore, it amounts to switching away from an area’s favorite team in order to show a “better” game.
Redskins and Eagles fans, regardless of how the game is going, want to watch their team play and they made plans based on the the TV schedule showing the Redskins at Eagles game on local TV.
Fourth, has Fox Sports ever heard of comebacks? Earlier in the year the Redskins almost came all the way back against these same Eagles. And had Redskins QB Robert Griffin not thrown a bonehead interception in the end zone with less than a minute to play in Sunday’s game, there would be even more egg on the faces of those experts who know better than us what we want to watch. The Redskins scored twice and converted a pair of two-point conversions to pull the Skins within one score at 24-16. They were driving for the possible tying score when Griffin threw the interception. Meanwhile, the Steelers ended up beating the Lions by 10 points. The Eagles ended up beating the Redskins by eight points.
To make matters worse, those who pay a lot of money to watch every down of every NFL game on DirecTV’s NFL Sunday Ticket were blacked out for about 15 minutes between the time the game was switched on local TV until the time they got around to lifting the blackout on the Sunday Ticket channel so local fans could watch the fourth quarter of the game. I’m sure a lot of people with NFL Sunday Ticket gave up thinking they weren’t going to make the switch.
Was it really worth ticking off a sizable number of people to please a few couch potato football fans who just want to watch the most competitive game possible? Those people had probably changed the channel already anyway – unless they’ve heard of comebacks.