Apogee

Football watching in my household has reached its highest point. I don't mean the games or the teams (that would be the 2006 Rose Bowl, of course), I mean the watching itself.

Sure, when you combine a big plasma teevee with a high definition NFL game streamed via Verizon FIOS Digital Broadband Super-Deluxe IPHDTVNET, you've got a great football watching experience. But add a DVR and adept use of the remote control, and you can refine the thing to an essence of pure teevee football gold.

Here's what you do:

1. Set the game to record.

2. Go do some other stuff, get a bite to eat, head to home depot, surf some political commentary (or porn, whatever), just kill time in whatever way suits you.

3. About an hour and a half after kickoff, sit down on the couch and hit play.

4. Fast forward through 10 minutes worth of useless intro commentary (or, in the case of a Sunday night NBC game or a Monday night ESPN game, 20 minutes worth of useless intro commentary, plus a stupid montage, plus a crappy cover of a crappy pop song, reworked with crappy self referential football-teevee-watching lyrics, performed by a crappy washed up pseudo-celeb).

5. Watch the opening kickoff, with index finger smartly placed on the "30 second skip" button.

6. Immediately after the runback of the kickoff, and each play thereafter throughout the game, press down on the "30 second skip" button and you will instantly be transported through a lot of extraneous crap, and the next thing you will see is the offense trotting up to the line of scrimmage to run the next play.

You can watch an entire NFL game in about 45 minutes using this method. Of course, games you are really interested in, you won't want to hit the skip button after every play. Sometimes the announcers have some decent commentary, and you'll want to watch the slow motion replays of the exciting plays. Also, if the game is nearing the end of a half, the team on offense may go into hurry up, in which case you can either judiciously use the skip button only after plays that stop the clock (out of bounds plays, incomplete passes, time outs, penalties, etc), or you can first hit the 10 second replay button and then immediately hit the 30 second skip button, which usually works out exactly right during a hurry up offense.

Missing all the commercials is great. Even better is missing all the dead time on the field during replay challenges, injuries, referee conferences, extra point tries, and -- the best thing of all to miss -- the times when the announcers throw it down to the old, used up, man-voiced sideline chick for some balky, ill-informed, often uncomfortable non-commentary.

But also you get to skip one of the things that infuriates to no end a person with an HD television watching a high definition NFL stream via their Verizon FIOS Digital Broadband Super-Deluxe IPHDTVNET: the halftime highlights which, though they are being transmitted in ultra-clear, 16x9 high definition to a state-of-the-art television monitor, are, for some idiotic reason, intentionally being pixilated, over-saturated, blurred, and/or overlaid with some obnoxious dot pattern so that they look worse than if you were watching them on a 13 inch black and white with rabbit ears. WHY? The first several times I witnessed this phenomenon this season, I thought my head would asplode. My inarticulate screams startled the neighbors.

But now I just skip past the entire halftime show, sometimes mouthing a near-inaudible "Fuck you Chris Berman, and your crappy over-saturated pixilated blurry highlights." And back to the second half of the game, all 20 minutes of it.