NFL Concerned HD is "too good" - LOL

Who can afford the tickets, let alone have money to travel & pay for parking at the games.

roger should go to a few games and sit in the "cheap" (relatively speaking) seats, and then he'd see one of the reasons why it's better on tv... the behaviour of the "fans" is woeful in many stadiums... i'd never bring my wife to an eagles game, that's for sure...

and that's aside from the fact that the product is simply better on tv than it is in person... even if you are an "educated" fan, it can be difficult to absorb everything that is going on...

and in more northern places, you freeze your butt off late in the season and that's made worse "double commercials" aeound virtually every kickoff...

and so on...

given the choice between staying home and watching the game on my pj or going to the linc, i'm gonna be parked in my recliner every time...

How the hell can the commish be worried when ,in the majority of cities,NFL seasons tickets are left in wils?

It happens in Chicago, and New York also. Same with Baseball. Been a long known fact that families leave their season tickets in their wills. Sports fanatics are nuttier than health food advocates, when it comes to what they worship.

I agree.

But doesn't the NFL get kickbacks from the broadcast stations?

+1 for this. The last game I was at was just a few years ago. Sitting in the cheap seats in Seattle, the language and attitude of the people sitting around me, and the two unstopped fistfights I saw, there's simply no way I would take my 9 year old to a game. I asked the Seahawks about single game tickets in the Family section, their response was that it's a season ticket holder area only but I was welcome to buy ticket for that section on the aftermarket sites.

"kickbacks"? not really...

but they do get immense broadcast rights fees...

yup... it can be downright scary at times... frankly, the attitude of "i bought a ticket, i can do anything i want" has pervaded way too many stadiums...

basic rule of thumb that needs to be enforced... if someone exhibits a behaviour that would get them arrested if they did it on a street corner, it should also be enforced in the stadium...

I believe you should go to a live game at least once, but after that, there really is no point as you are just there to watch the game instead of taking in the sites and sounds like you do the first time you go. I have been to Lambeau field for four games, and even though it was amazingly fun (except for the Monday night game in the cold and rain and we were losing which made it worse) I have to say that I would rather watch a game on TV. Not only are you completely comfortable, but you get a better view of the action and if you need a soda/snack/b-room break, everything is within seconds of where you are sitting on your sofa/recliner/whatever.

Agreed the live game experience is something unique, the pulse of the crowd is awesome, but I am with you guys sit at home if you like and take it all in on a large screen and it is especially enjoyable on a Plasma And you can fling expletives without the threat of a butt whipping

thing is, i go to college games quite regularly... obviously not "big time" games, since the philadelphia area isn't exactly a hotbed of college football...

and it's a MUCH better experience than a nfl game... the coeds don't hurt either...

heck, i even take the chance of freezing my butt off and go to the army/navy game every year... fwiw, the "stadium experience" for that game is unmatched, if anyone ever gets a chance to go, they should...

Nfl has always had a high quality production -and the nfl has been more offensive and better to watch in the recent(10 yrs roughy) years.If you don't have good seats it's better on tv.

We attended all 6 Stanford home games this year because the tickets are reasonable, the team is good, and the weather was cooperative. There is also no bad seat there since the stadium is well designed and intentionally small. Good experiences for fans keep fans coming, even with everything on TV. The SF Giants, for example, continue to sell out every home game. The Raiders, by contrast, continue to sell out nearly none.

Yep, and yet the teams with loyal fan bases have no trouble filling the place. In the NFL, the local team is blacked out if the stadium isn't sold out and there are still (outside of the Raiders), virtually no local blackouts in the league. Never mind that that's a dumb rule, the point is that it's nearly never enforced.

^^^

ot, but is the new stadium really nice?

dating myself here, but when i was a yute, we lived in that area for a year... me and my brother sat in the end zone of the farm for the games during plunkett's last year there... my parents had the good seats on the 50... lol...

tying that into the current topic... can you even imagine letting a 7 & 5 year old go sit by themselves in a nfl stadium? let alone in end zone seats?

yep, stanford's remodeled stadium, done under the supervision of bill walsh, is one of the best stadium experiences in college football. easy parking, stadium rarely sells out and really no bad seats.

sf giants probably have best stadium experience of anywhere in professional sports. great venue, food, between inning entertainment, and the loudest, most intense fans in mlb.

49ers stadium experience sucks. candlestick is a pile of s**t and i won't go there to watch any game. so yeah, for the stick, watching in hd is kind of mandatory, even if fox does the hd broadcast.

The stadium is terrific now, yes. It's not NFL-quality, but it's terrific.

I agree with every you said about Stanford, except the parking -- it's terrible, and is actually a deterrent to going. We have a "hack" now, so we can tolerate it, but last season it made us think, "are we ever coming here again?" I suspect that it's whatever your "one inconvenience" is that leads people to stay home and watch on TV. Some people find it's the pricey food, others the parking, others the bad sight lines... Whatever, I think the NFL needs to realize that to fill stadiums for the coming decades, it just needs to keep the experience good enough and priced decently enough to keep that going.

Look at Yankee Stadium. They never sell out the bottom tier of crazy-expensive seats. They'd rather revenue max on hedge-fund season-ticket holders than fill the place. Fine, but it has consequences. And YES in HD is good enough for most Yankee fans, it appears, but over 20 years, you want people to have experienced the team live -- those are your most loyal fans.

The 49ers, incidentally, will have a deluxe new palace in 2 years. I suspect it will sell every ticket for a long, long while to come.

Yute? Somebody's been watching My Cousin Vinney But yeah, I agree with you. I'd much rather watch a game in my recliner, get a cold beer without waiting, and always (well almost always) have a clean, not crowded bathroom. We went to a Raiders game once and that was it However, college football (Stanford, San Jose State, Cal) is much better even if parking sucks. But, it's still marginally better than parking for an NFL game. Baseball hasn't been too bad but we're talkin' football here.

I wonder when the Red Zone Channel is going to be pulled. 7 hours of commercial free non-stop football on the NFL network. When will FOX and CBS demand this channel be pulled. Since the skins season is over, the Red Zone channel is all I watch.

Washington rarely sells out games. Season tickets used to be a big deal. Now, Dan Schneider sues people under contract who can't afford their tickets any more. They can't sell their tickets for face value. The Redskins have removed several thousand seats from FedEx field so the games can air on TV. I guess 20 years of suckiness takes it's toll.

Right, being terrible forever is a problem, but that's rare in the NFL. Thanks to the salary cap and an effective draft, the league has pretty amazing parity.

By the way, the Packers lead the NFL with 374 straight sellouts entering the season, the Redskins follow at 364, the Steelers next at 335. The Giants, Jets, 49ers, Bronocs Bears and Cowboys (very soon) are all at 200+. The fact the Redskins need to discount tickets isn't because of HD. It's because the product has been bad and expensive. I see no real long-term threat to sellouts so long as teams understand $100+ ticket minimums aren't sustainable for awful teams.

Consider another real example: The Colts had sold out their tickets every year since 2003 on season tickets alone. They were a perennial playoff contender and the fans supported them. They actually had shut down their sales department, it wasn't needed. They just kept a wait list, sent out renewals and then filled from the wait list if some people didn't renew (economic reasons, moving away, death in the family, whatever). Then, in 2011, the Colts sucked a lot. They even seemed to be throwing games at times to get the top pick. Well, they wound up 3000 tickets short of a full stadium. They outsourced the sales -- remember, no sales staff -- to make sure the sellout streak stayed alive and the games remained on TV. And, lo, the Colts are good and fun again. Do you think they'll have any problem selling out for 2013? Not likely.

well the nfl not wanting fans to switch to hd viewing only of their games strategy must include contract clauses that
require fox and espn to broadcast crap hd of the games.

hell it also explains the awful pq on the nfl network.

Any one else noticed the absolutely awful PQ on NBC in particular? I know Fox , CBS and ESPN are all suspect as well but NBC seems to be leaps and bounds worse. And that's not just because of Chris Collinsworth.

The short answer is YES, HD is killing the NFL if by killing you mean less people desire to physically go to a game. There's enough people to still sell out most games but that doesn't negate the fact that a larger percentage would prefer to watch the game at home in the comfortable surroundings of their big screen HD TV. It's a combination of HD technology along with a big screen display that's killing the NFL home game experience. And the silent killer, behind the scenes just out of the main stream reasons lurks the number one menace to the NFL butt in the seat migration. Fantasy Football.

Must be your carrier because NBC OTA looks about as good as one would expect (which is really good on a basically uncompressed signal) in spite of Chris Collinsworth.

I think the NFL plan is one day ONLY offer NFL games on DirecTV.

DirecTV will down rez the games til they look as bad quality wise as the Chiller station--that will force people back to the stadiums to see the games--then the NFL will try to sell people in the stands Downrezz binoculars so they can still make money through the TV route!

@Otto Pylot.. What's weird though is how much better ABC, CBS and Fox are than NBC.

^^^

as he noted, that's a provider, not broadcaster, issue...

most members would put cbs abd nbc at the top for hd football pq.

fox espn and abc are all second tier.