Matthew Schwartz Photo on Unsplash
No one curses the hard-working National Football League schedule-makers more than sportswriters/columnists and old people. I know. I used to be the former and now I am the latter, one of those old farts who struggles to stay awake ’til the crack of midnight in order to watch the conclusion of a game that feels as if it began day before yesterday.
Thanks, guys. I know it’s not your fault.
Television, network and cable, dictates starting times for games. Seeking the most eyes on the screen’s money-making commercials, they consider all manner of factors but mostly time zones and not the body clocks of old people like me. If you are a person of a certain age and you want to watch the best NFL football, much of which is now played when the sun don’t shine, you should live in the Pacific Time Zone. I don’t.
I live in the Eastern Time Zone. For most of the years since I have become a person older than a dinosaur, this hasn’t mattered. The 9-3 Cleveland Browns that I used to write about as a newspaper columnist and now pay attention to at stevelovewriter.com have been so bad for so long that the TV brainiacs and the NFL geniuses only allowed them to play at night as often as they were required to by contract. Still, according to NFL operations, “it takes hundreds of computers in a secure room to produce thousands of possible schedules” from which “the best possible one” is chosen.
In case there was any doubt, the NFL readily acknowledges that its “marquee matchups often are scheduled to air during the week’s premier times slots—Thursday, Sunday, or Monday nights or the late game on Sunday afternoon.” The Browns, suffice it to say, have seldom been marquee material since their return to the league in 1999.
Except for countless losses that Browns followers have had to endure, this state of affairs at least has yielded a regular and pleasant Sunday starting time of 1 p.m., Eastern. Old people like me are awake at that time, except when, like my friend Arthur, they’re napping. Football was meant for Saturday (college) or Sunday (pro) afternoons. That’s when the Akron Pros, first champion of the league that subsequently became known as the NFL, set a standard. It is still when the games should be played.
I should acknowledge here that my sleep habits might be considered unusual, if you too are not old. But unlike the supposed claim of Benjamin Franklin that “early to bed and early to rise makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise”—I am 0-for-3—I have found that early to rise makes a man tired and causes his eyelids to get in the way of football. I usually rise by 4 a.m. because my late, beloved kitty used to jump into bed, pretend to want to cuddle (just two boys just having a good time) when what he really wanted was to be fed and he did not stop wanting this until he was. He reset my forever body clock.
Now, the NFL has announced that in addition to the Browns playing host to Baltimore for a previously scheduled Monday Night Football game (December 14), their game of Sunday, December 20, at the suddenly hot New York Giants, has been “flexed” to the Sunday Night Football slot, with kickoff at 8:20. This will be Cleveland’s third prime time game this season when in other years we old people have had to put up with just one.
The NFL introduced “flexible scheduling” in 2006 “to make sure the best late-season matchups reach the largest audiences.” Flex scheduling is used for Sunday Night Games in NFL Weeks 11 through 17 and may be used during Weeks 5 through 10 but no more than twice. They mess with the body clocks of early-to-bed-early-to-risers, young and old, for M-O-N-E-Y, as well as competitive aesthetics.
About now you may be thinking: Quit your whining, Dirt for Brains, haven’t you heard of the VCR? Well, yes, the old can learn new tricks, even how to operate a new-fangled gadget that records shows to be played back later. That would be at 4 a.m., but even playback has its potential downside. If you are like me, you do not want to know the outcome of the game before you begin the playback. This requires me to make sure the TV is not on ESPN or a Cleveland station when I click the remote to turn on the TV. When it is, I sometimes have been hit between blurry old eyes with the score before I can switch to the “list” of recordings from which I can replay the desired game.
Likewise, for concern I will see the result, I cannot take the newspaper out of its wrapper after I carry it in from the driveway. Nor, can I power up the iPad on which I do my early-morning reading. Instead, I start the coffee and go straight to my front-row seat in the living room. It is softer and comfier than stadium seats and social distancing is not required. It is not much of a sacrifice to delay reading about the game, because the stories and columns will tend to be truncated and not up to their usual quality. This is not wholly the fault of the writers, a number of whom I once shared various pressboxes.
Deadlines for football games beginning after 8 p.m. always were impossible, especially for columnists. Now of the newspapers that remain a number have to que up to be printed on shared presses. Deadlines are earlier and cannot be extended to accommodate even that night game that the NFL thinks the Browns deserve.
On the surface this may appear to be no loss since all manner of media, print and electronic, face unending deadlines. The printed page has been deemphasized in favor of publishing online all the news not quite fit for primetime, given its hurried, haphazard production timetable. Little time to write means less time to write well and thoughtfully. I’m glad some of the great writers on whom I grew up—Blackie Sherrod, Jim Murray, two of countless others—did not live to be robbed of the perfect word, metaphor, or analogy by a new world in which time has devoured the meat of the writing.
Yeah, I’m old and it’s growing dark and the words I spit out during night games are not printable. I guess you could say I’m just not flexible enough for flexible scheduling.
