Weak Off

Originally published on FOXSports.com.

Reportedly, a sage NFL soothsayer by the name of Dan Reeves told a veteran defensive back prior to Super Bowl XXXIII “Beware the idles of the off-week.” Eugene Robinson didn’t listen.

With two weeks of constant pressure from waiting for the biggest game of the year, trying to win one for the coach with a mended ticker, and being upstaged by Ray Buchanan’s dog collar at media day, Robinson finally broke less than 24 hours before kick off. You know the rest. Undercover cops and the world’s oldest profession. It’s the most famous off-field incident in Super Bowl history and it probably left Reeves with a pregame dream so bad as to rival that of Calpurnia Pisonis.

But we shouldn’t have been surprised. A week without football will do weird things to a person, which makes the NFL’s almost annual fortnight fast prior to the Super Bowl that much more troubling.

Forget for a moment overblown hype, extended preparation, and margin of victory. The two-week wait jeopardizes something much more valuable for you and me: the precious Circadian rhythm sports fans develop between August and February.

Football is built on the seven-day schedule. For players, the actual game day represents their current level of achievement on the gridiron. They start out playing on Fridays and if they’re good they graduate to Saturdays and if they’re great they get to suit up on Sundays.

It’s not that much different for football fans. Buy the groceries Wednesday, go to the movies during the week, and get the grunt work out of the way for the good stuff on Sunday. We’re conditioned to expect it right at 1 pm, but we’ll start salivating hours before. Yet here we sit today with nothing, the first empty Sunday in exactly 130 days.

Baseball fans can get their fix every day between April and October. Any time you want it during the summer, baseball is there. Hoops and hockey are haunted by the fact that their postseason tournaments define their seasons. You can pay attention now but you really don’t have to. Can you tell me your favorite NBA, NHL or college team’s schedule for the next two weeks? I can’t, but I could recite the entire 2006 Bears schedule by mid-August. I didn’t need an advent calendar, I knew it was Christmas when Chicago went to Detroit. Such is the power of NFL schedule.

So why does the league continue to eschew one of its defining characteristics? Theories abound but the answer is probably simpler than you think: the NFL takes an extra week because it can.

As much as the NFL is destination programming for millions of Americans every Sunday, the Super Bowl is final destination programming for everybody. Football fans would wait until June for the Super Bowl if they had to and the casual fan, who may watch only one game a year, will show up at the same time everyone else does (with some sort of dip) and all of this represents a disturbing trend in the way we watch professional sports: longer seasons and less control.

While media in general, from TiVo to iTunes, continues to move towards increased user control the professional leagues still horde their content with a Caesar-like autocracy.

Last year the NBA Finals didn’t start until June 8. Twenty years earlier it was over on that exact date. Major League Baseball is reportedly close to finalizing a deal that would give exclusive rights to their Extra Innings package to DirecTV, effectively taking baseball out of hundreds of thousands of homes across the country. With a DVR you can catch 24 whenever you want and, if you’re a Time-Warner subscriber, I recommend Thursdays because it helps you forget that you can’t get The NFL Network.

To say that the extra week between the conference championship games and the Super Bowl is an indication that the NFL is a money-hungry, me-first, corporate beast that doesn’t care about its fans would be fun but overly simplistic. Instead let’s look at this odd football-free weekend as an opportunity rather than a slight. It all starts with Roger Goodell.

As the NFL’s new commissioner, Goodell didn’t take control of the league until the season was a mere month away. Paul Tagliabue’s fingerprints will still be all over the Lombardi trophy this year, but it’s the future that should interest us.

Imagine if Goodell did something increasingly rare in the modern sports landscape and threw the fans a bone, heard their cries and sacrificed a little on the back end to actually give something back. Idealistic? Yes. If only there was more time to mount a serious campaign and snow under the NFL offices with letters and e-mails. Wait, what are you doing today?

The timing really couldn’t be better. While Bud Selig is mulling perhaps the most controversial TV deal ever, Goodell could step right in and become the greatest commissioner of the new century by comparison. All it would take is one press conference.

We aren’t asking much. Just give us our football straight, no buffer. Or, continue to ignore the very pulse of football as a spectator sport, the weekly fix that’s lined the coffers and made junkies out of us all.

It wouldn’t be the first time fans felt betrayed by the big-wigs, but you, Mr. Goodell, have a clean slate. Don’t leave everyone asking the inevitable:

Et tu, Roger?