football

When you are a fan of a particular NFL team and don’t live in that city’s local viewing area, you really only have these choices for being able to watch your favorite team play on TV:

Hope that your team is playing in one of the weekly nationally-televised games (Sunday night football, Monday Night Football, one of those Thanksgiving games, or that random Thursday or Saturday night game that gets national coverage)
Hope that your local FOX or CBS affiliate is carrying the national 4p game that week in a double-header and that your team is in it
Get DirecTV’s Sunday Ticket, so you can pay more money than you should just to watch that one game every week
Go to the local smoke-filled sports bar and watch the game on one of the bar’s big screens… and if you’re lucky you’ll get the game audio instead of having to watch it with closed captions
Watch the game later on a replay aired on the NFL Network
Follow along online via nfl.com’s game stats/scoreboard page

Or you have the most common option: rely on your local CBS or FOX affiliate to decide which games they’re going to air in their markets. The worst part is that they don’t have to make that decision until late in the week preceding the game date.