Walk through knee deep snow NFL style

There was a time that the NFL was nothing more than a stressful period of three hours on Sunday that came in 10 minute increments.

Earlier today @JoshHoutz posted on Twitter a quick vid of Dan Marino throwing one of his many perfect passes. It got me thinking. No not about Dan Marino, those videos are really a dime a dozen these days. Great all the time dont’ get me wrong but this time around nostalgia was not about Marino.

For many of those out there the NFL is nothing more than the big business of over saturated games to the markets and some product called Sunday NFL Ticket. Yeah imagine having the opportunity to buy a season pass to see all of the NFL games live!

O.k. so I will admit this is akin to listening to my father and his father talk about walking three miles to school every day in knee-deep snow. “You have no idea how good you have it with busses” I heard a million times. I did of course learn years later that they did have busses but they had to walk a half mile to get to it in, well, you know, knee-deep snow.

So this video. Back in the day, my day, the 1970;s and 1980’s we would sit around the TV on Sunday and watch whatever game the local channel decided to play that day. You would check the T.V. Guide, yes that was a real thing, and see what weekends game was going to be. Sometimes they would get it wrong.

The telecast was as it is today, full of commercials, but there was no running ticker at the bottom with fantasy football notes, big plays, statistics, or even scores. In fact, there was nothing at the bottom. It was a top to bottom full bleed screen.

So imagine being a Miami Dolphins fan sitting on the living room floor with all your Dolphins merchandise that you had to order from the J.C. Penney catalog because you lived eight states North of Florida and you were dying to find out if the Dolphins were winning.  (Really big intentional run-on sentence there).

Well, you had to wait. See every ten minutes or so depending on the commercial schedule a list of scores would pop up on the screen. At first they were in two columns and since they switched to the next “page” you had to be quick to locate the game you wanted to see the score for. You got the teams, the score, and quarter. Then as the television stations got more advanced, they added the time left in the game. Now we’re talking!

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This wasn’t a big problem for the first three-quarters but in close games heading into the 4th you had no idea what was going on. No radio station to dial into, no ESPN with all the live updates, you had to sit there. And wait. God forbid you leave you the room and miss it.

Sometimes your game ended before they even showed the scores of the other games. There was no post-game show so you had two options. If it was an early game, switch to the afternoon game and wait for the 10 minute ticker (sometimes you had to wait until half-time) or if it was the afternoon game you needed to wait until the news came on after the games had ended.

These days I find it funny when I hear fans complain about all that ticker stuff at the bottom of the screen and laugh a little inside when I think of the complaints they would have if that little ticker went away. 1/2 mile in knee-deep snow football style.