Dear NFL: Fuck You. The NFL’s rules on broadcasting games — such as this afternoon’s much ballyhooed contest between the remaining undefeated teams in the league — mean that any market with an un-sold-out local-team game can’t see any other games on TV at the same time, supposedly to encourage in-person attendance. Yes, this means even in Houston, with the Texans on the road.

There are a number of problems with this. On any given Sunday, there are games expected to be interesting — like Colts v. Pats — and games unlikely to be worth two squirts of piss, both in terms of competition and in terms of the later season, like, say, Texans v. Raiders. The NFL doesn’t care what we want to watch, though; they want to control the feeds and force us, if we want to watch football at 3:00 today, to watch the crappy game instead of the one everyone will be talking about tomorrow.

Again: Fuck you, NFL.

It’s really yet another example of old business models trying to force their way through a new world. It’s not gonna happen. The more ways of communication we have, the more ways people like the NFL have to figure out how to block to preserve these chickenshit restrictions. Here’s a clue: give people what they want to buy, and stop doing things like this to piss them off.

This kind of crap is another in the long list of reasons we never, ever go to live games. It’s a shitty experience compared to watching at home, and encourages these absurd rules. Fuck that.

The Chron, believe it or not, has a good piece on it.