Shuttle Bus-ted

Football is becoming baseball. The football fan is getting dumped on. It comes in small doses. But it is like the erosion of a beach. Slow, insidious, relentless.

1) You can vote with your dollars and walk. Or take the shuttle bus. Seasons tickets holders with 1-5 seats are getting the 'right' to buy a parking pass for 10 games x $15 = $150 while Xanadu and the new stadium get built. The rest of us get sent to park in Osh Kosh and take the shuttle bus. Tailgating is a thing of the past, and getting home after the game will become a true joy.

2) "Flex" games sound like a great idea because they give the national audience a much better game. Problem is that these are tv concessions where the (overpaying) networks begin to ask for everything. And then, like dominoes, the other networks that lose those competitive games want better games too. So more games get flexed from 1pm to 4pm. Football keeps drifting to later starts which are not nearly as good to attend as the traditional 1PM game.

2) Flex games run amok. Out of 8 home games last season, THREE (38%) were moved. 3 x 77,000 fans = a lot of people whose schedules were bumped around. This is simply disrespectful of the paying audience. Mara remembered how the tickerholder paid the NFL's bills. Now TV pays millions, Mara is dead and the ticketholder is less important.

4) Eagles fans were greeted with $5,000 dollar ticket licenses per seat when they got a new stadium. What will be the over/under on how much the Giants will be charging for theirs?

Insidious? Rules keep the game clock rolling more so that the same 3:00 hour game has more "tv timeouts" that disrupt the flow of the game. This is a great game but we are losing it to the Snyders of the world who want every dollar out of their investment now with no future for the sport. I laughed when Snyder started charging $10 to fans for attending preseason camp practices. What a total f'g jerk. And the joke was on him when that meant that other teams could now 'pay' to attend and scout his team! But the lesson is that you need to speak out about these practices or else we are going to lose this great sport.