Our weekly look at the cartographical hodge-podge of NFL broadcasts, courtesy of the folks from
the506.com.
The eyeball network offers four low-wattage broadcasts in its appetizer game Sunday, with the bulk of the nation getting the San Diego-Minnesota showdown. It’s a real knock on Buffalo (what else is new) that football fans in New England, home of a nearby division rival, are being fed a game between teams with no geographic proximity to them instead of Bengals-Bills.
San Diego-Minnesota also shows up in a few other random markets, but the considering the slim pickins in this time slot, it makes about as much sense to show it on the Delmarva peninsula, for example, as any other game.
A sports radio station in Oakland lobbied fans not to buy tickets to the Texans-Raiders snoozer so that they could watch the New England-Indy game. They got their wish. The game in Oakland didn’t sell out on time, so the Bay Area will get the Game of the Millennium Sunday, as will almost the entire nation: Patriots-Colts will get the widest national distribution of any non-primetime game this year.
Houston fans were not so lucky. With their team on the road, they’ll be fed the Texans-Raiders game, which we named
one of the 10 mangiest dogs of the season when the schedules were released back in April.
Cleveland fans also get the shaft. The Fox network’s only 4 p.m. game competing with New England-Indy is Seattle at Cleveland, so folks in the home market won’t get the competing CBS broadcast.
Joe Buck is back from baseball duty and he and Troy Aikman, the network’s No. 1 football crew, cover the Green Bay-Kansas City game at 1 p.m., which gets the network’s widest distribution.
It’s always interesting to note that southern Mississippi, Brett Favre’s original stomping grounds, almost always gets the Green Bay broadcast.
Curiosities of the week: Folks in San Diego and in southeastern Louisiana get Seattle-Cleveland at 4 p.m. Football fans in the southern tip of Texas get Carolina-Tennessee.
