Every NFL game needs to be available in HD. Period. Right now if you don't live in a major AFC media market or Indianapolis, there's a pretty solid chance your team is rarely, if ever, featured in HD. If you're like me, living in Nashville with a fancy new TV that you financed at Best Buy for roughly the gross national product of Swaziland, every time you sit down to watch the Titans play you hear "This game isn't even in HD?" from your wife. And you have to sort of dully nod your head. Plus, the monthly payment check for the TV seems to arrive the Monday after every game I couldn't watch in HD. Sweet.
This year was my first opportunity to watch the NFL in HD and I DVR'ed the Titans opener against the New York Jets, assuming that it would tape fine in HD while I was down in Alabama for LSU-Auburn. Then I got home and had a regular broadcast which barely used up two-thirds of my available screen. My wife and I spent an embarrassing amount of time trying to get the TV to work just because it didn't even occur to us that an NFL broadcast might not be in HD. Of course, by my wife and I, I mean my wife. I have no idea how anything technological works except the DVR. For some reason the DVR and I are simpatico.
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| Made you look! Now apply the Victoria's Secret model rule to HD television. (Getty Images) |
When we went shopping for a TV, the Best Buy guy addressed every discussion point to me. He went on and on about the relative merits of plasma vs. LCD, what burn-in dangers were, the cleaning of the TV, driving supportive studs into the wall and what relative strength wall-mount we might need, how many quarts of oil the engine in the screen required, and on and on. I gamely nodded but this just encouraged him further.
He dove into pixelated differential theory or some such and I literally felt like I was in ninth grade geometry class all over again. Which wasn't good at all because I was removed from Advanced Geometry class at Martin Luther King Magnet and placed in honors geometry due to my inability to figure out the concepts. During honors geometry at MLK (every class at MLK that wasn't advanced was honors, which was pretty Orwellian come to think of it) my friend Paul once turned in his homework assignment written on a sock. The switch from advanced geometry to honors geometry later paved the way for me to end up in Mathematical Ideas for an entire year at George Washington where, and this is completely true, we had a math test where we were supposed to count the number of panels on a soccer ball.
So, anyway, after about five minutes, I told the Best Buy guy I had no idea about anything he had just told me. Then I went and played Xbox 360 video games while my wife asked all sorts of pertinent and highly technical questions. Then we got home and my wife literally constructed a television stand out of 15 million wooden pieces and then hooked up the television and formatted our picture. All I did was carry the heavy boxes. And we lived happily ever after with our new HD flat screen TV ... except we didn't. That's because someone at CBS has decided it makes sense to pay over $600 million for the right to broadcast AFC games but not broadcast them all in HD. Even though every other NFL game on NBC, Fox and ESPN is broadcast in HD.
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| Don't ask Clay how to install this flat-panel TV in your living room. (Getty Images) |
It's made all the worse because CBS became the first network to broadcast an NFL game in HD back in 1998. And if you haven't been watching sports in HD, it will completely revolutionize your viewing. I was one of those flat-earthers who wasn't willing to shill out all the money for a flat-screen TV with HD because I didn't think it would make much difference. I was, not surprisingly, a fool. The difference is seismic. Watching sports in HD is a completely different experience.
Now in fairness, CBS broadcasts the SEC, the Masters, the NCAA Tournament and weekly NCAA games in HD so they do, probably, have more HD hours featuring sports than any other network broadcaster. And perhaps this makes it even more expensive and difficult to put all the AFC games into HD. But, even still, I'm begging for CBS to start.
Since I'm nothing if not an incredibly astute businessman, I decided to lend my aid to the company and come up with eight ways CBS can make more money off the NFL, thus allowing all NFL games to be broadcast in HD:
1. Add pink dolphins to the NFL Today set. This sounds more revolutionary than it really is. Already tons of guy with nothing better to do on Sunday mornings sit around watching the HD pregame show. Trust me, it's awesome to go from watching a bunch of guys in suits sitting at an oak table in HD to an actual game that isn't in HD. But I feel like women with nothing better to do on Sunday morning are a great untapped asset here when it comes to ratings. That's why putting a pink dolphin in a tank in front of the wooden table would be a ratings goldmine. Maybe even get fancy and replace the wooden table with a tank that functions as a table. Then you have the guys debating games while the pink dolphins are playing with inflatable footballs in the tanks. Each week the talking head who does the worst in picking games could get tossed into the tank with the pink dolphins. The result of Dan Marino swimming with a pink dolphin? One word separated by a dash, cha-ching.
2. Place random Victoria's Secret models in the crowd behind the bench. Then have the camera pan over the crowd. If your buddies are anything like mine, every time a hot girl gets noticed in the crowd they stop the DVR and check her out. Usually this move is most prominent in quick cutaway shots of the cheerleaders. But you could take advantage of the crisp HD picture by having these women wearing product placement sports bras or the like in the crowd. Of course, since my local CBS station here in Nashville wasn't willing to show the Victoria's Secret fashion show this might not work out that well for me.
3. CSI: NFL HD: Instead of using instant replay, CBS should have David Caruso and that guy from CSI with the beard analyze whether a pass was completed, or a fumble happened, or a first down was gained based on cleat marks, grass stains and a paint stain on a glove. Then David Caruso could walk out onto the field and reconstruct the play to announce the result. Bonus rating points if they could put a recreation on the Jumbotron in those slow-motion, slightly out-of-focus montages that are so popular in the CSI shows.
