Does Football Season Ever End?

Bone-crushing hits, Hail Mary passes that sail through the crisp autumn air and a fan-friendly schedule that favors the working class have facilitated the exponential growth of the National Football League. Every Sunday from September to February, millions of Americans tailgate outside the stadium or tune in from their living rooms to see their favorite teams play.

NFL viewership is at an all-time high. According to Nielsen Media Ratings from the fall of 2008, 225 million Americans watched an NFL football game at some point during the regular season. That's roughly one million more than the total number of people that voted in the 2008 Presidential Election. Sunday afternoon NFL broadcasts on FOX and CBS averaged 16.6 million viewers, up from an average of 15.8 million in 2003.  

Recently however, it seems that being an avid NFL fan isn't just about spending Sundays sitting in your armchair in front of the TV. Year-round coverage of the NFL has been established over the past few years, setting a precedent for fans to stay informed both during the regular season and in the offseason.

Beginning with the launch of the NFL Network in 2003, the NFL began to provide its growing fan base with more games and in-depth analysis. For the first few weeks the network was on the air, only past Super Bowls and other footage from NFL films were shown. As it became more established and widely broadcast, NFL players and coaches were hired for on-air positions. Fired Houston Texans general manager Charlie Casserly, former San Francisco 49ers and Detroit Lions head coach Steve Marriucchi as well as retired running backs Terrell Davis and Marshall Faulk were some of the people who joined the network in its earliest stages.

Equipped with these analysts and commentators like Bryant Gumbel and Cris Collinsworth, the NFL Network began broadcasting select games on Thursday and Saturday nights at 8 p.m. eastern time during the final five weeks of the 2006 regular season in a package they called Run to the Playoffs. The series debuted on Thanksgiving Day 2006 when the network aired an AFC West matchup between the Kansas City Chiefs and Denver Broncos, and lasted for the remainder of the regular season. In 2008 it was modified to eliminate all but one of the Saturday night games and add three more Thursday night games in their place. This package fixated cravings from football fans by giving them a game to watch during the week as well as an extra matchup on the weekend.      

Additionally, all Sunday games had been made available to fans through cable packages like Direct TV's NFL Sunday Ticket, which allowed fans to watch their favorite team from all over the country. NFL packages offered by Sirius Satellite radio have provided the same access via a different medium. In the Digital Age, a subscription to NFL Field Pass from NFL.com will allow fans to watch streaming games or listen to the live radio broadcast for their favorite team.

In the offseason, the NFL Network provided fans with the latest on trades, free agent signings, mini-camps and training camps with programs like Team Cam and Total Access with Rich Eisen. Both programs updated fans with the latest information on their favorite team. They not only covered more specific facets of the league for a homogenous audience, but they were also covering stories once only assigned to local beat writers. The sport media conglomerate had gone way beyond their original intent of providing fans with a network they could watch "when all they wanted was football" and adapted well to the changing business of sports journalism.  

Immediately after the Super Bowl, the NFL Network turned its attention to the NFL Scouting Combine held in Indianapolis at the end of February. In 2008, the NFL Network became the first media outlet to televise the entire event from beginning to end. Once reserved for NFL personnel, the sports media were now able to provide fans with a glimpse of potential future stars their team had been looking at. From their own living room, football fanatics could watch a prospective draft choice perform all the tasks at the combine, including the 40-yard dash, vertical jump and bench press.

Hype has also increased for the NFL Draft, as the media have turned NFL Draft Day into NFL Draft Weekend. In the months leading up to the draft, NFL.com featured various mock drafts, one of which was titled On the Beat. The online multimedia article featured 32 beat writers, one from each NFL team, who provided insight on a player they thought their team was likely to draft.

The website for Sirius Radio took the draft from a player's prospective by including weekly draft diaries from college prospects. Draft choices like wide receiver Jeremy Maclin, linebacker Brian Okrapor and linebacker Derrick Williams revealed their thoughts on the teams that would draft them in weekly reflections that were published.      

Live coverage of the 14-hour, two-day draft was broadcast on NFL.com. The new location of the draft was the larger more majestic Radio City Music Hall, and the start time was moved forward from noon to 4 pm, allowing coverage to move into prime time.           

Sirius satellite radio had pretty extensive coverage of the draft considering that the draft was not even televised until well after the 1970 AFL-NFL merger.

The schedule for Sirius satellite radio during Draft Weekend ran from 3 p.m. to 3 a.m. eastern time on Saturday and from 10 a.m. to 12 a.m. on Sunday. Coverage spanned 27 hours over two days.

In early April, the NFL Network decided to air a special on the release of the regular season schedule. Even the biggest NFL fan would agree that airing this special was an example of overstepping the boundaries of necessary coverage for a couple of reasons. First of all, the opponents each team will face the following season are released shortly after the conclusion of the regular season each year, so when the special aired, fans had already known who their team would face in the upcoming season. The only portion of the schedule that was revealed to the fans was the preseason opponents and the start time of each game. Second, the start times of any game past Week 10 of the regular season are subject to change with the NFL's flex-scheduling policy, which allows a matchup to be moved into prime time for NBC's Sunday Night Football. The only reason the special was aired was that the sports network feared that fans got tired of stale draft specials.

This past NFL offseason clearly illustrates the expansion of NFL coverage by digital and non-digital media. The draft has grown from a one-day event in a hotel basement to a weekend at Radio City Music Hall attended by the sports media. The releasing of the schedule is a television event that attracts all the fans. The league has definitely created a culture "where football season never ends", as advertised by the NFL Network in its earliest stages, but they have gone too far in creating an atmosphere that bores fans with excessive coverage.