NFL’s RedZone channel is a middle-aged man’s brain rot. With the constant switching from game to game, up to three or four depending on the time of day, navigating NFL’s now twenty-year old channel can seem like a lot.
First launched on DirecTV in 2005, RedZone has been a significant factor in the NFL’s popularity and growth—further buoyed by legalized sports betting and the fantasy football craze. In its early days, the RedZone seemed to be nothing more than a more efficient way to watch your favorite teams play at the same time. With the average amount of games playing at a given time of day being at a maximum of two to three on a Sunday early afternoon, RedZone was nowhere near as crowded as we see it in the present day. But as the NFL grew, adding more channels and making more stars, the amount of games playing at a given time increased exponentially. Soon, more and more people started to tune in, and the channel became more crowded to accommodate a growing need. Currently, RedZone is split into four screens, each one showing a different game with different audios, all at the same time.
It comes at no surprise that the NFL itself thinks highly of the channel’s growth. When speaking at a Sports Business Journal conference, the NFL’s chief media executive, Brian Rolapp, shared his high praise.
“The RedZone channel might be the greatest linear channel ever created,” Rolapp said.
The RedZone is, in its simplest form, football without the fluff. No replays, no punts, no commercials. And in that it is easy to mistake the channel as being linear.
But when the channel abruptly switches from a Detroit Lions touchdown to being in the middle of an offensive scramble between the Packers and the Rams, viewers lose the time to celebrate. They lose that moment of excitement and joy—what truly makes football worth watching. Instead, they are thrust into another high intensity moment, a constant stop and go, back and forth that forgets the reason why they watch football: enjoyment.
In this, the RedZone has become something of a trap: playing to a new generation’s short attention span with its fast and unrelenting pace. Hours have been lost wasting away in front of a couch, trying to consume four games at once. This new trend could be partially attributed to the rise of fantasy football, where in order to win one has to develop new strategies which require the kind of no-nonsense, spoon-fed information the RedZone provides. People will even pay for this experience: a notable fifteen dollars every month.
With the rise of fantasy football, the Sunday game day experience has become less of cheering for the teams you used to follow wholeheartedly as a kid, and much more of hopping between channels, hoping to catch a glimpse of your fantasy players across four glowing screens. RedZone provides this: a perfect deviation from what football used to be. For the people who can afford the subscription, and watch football purely for the purpose of winning with their fantasy teams, RedZone may be a good choice. But for those bothered by the fast, unrelenting pace and tired of just spoon-fed information, maybe it is time to zone out the RedZone.
