Those of you who own DirecTV will get to see the long-hyped NFL Network's debut this evening. This event will not spur me to buying a dish for my home, however. The planned schedule includes no live football games, no rebroadcast of classic games, and little in the way of go-to programming for viewers unsure of what they want to watch. What you will get is hour after hour of NFL Films, post-game news conferences and interviews, and football news 24-7; no doubt we will see made-for-TV movies, along the lines of "Shack: The James Harris Story".

I understand there is a market for this sort of thing, but one of the reasons I no longer watch ESPN Classic is the repetitive programming: SportsCentury documentaries on Ken Dorsey and the bi-weekly rebroadcast of the '81 Clemson-South Carolina classic really test my obsession with sports, when what I really want to see are games. It is hard to believe that ESPN, which is run by the same outfit as ABC, can't get the rights to classic Monday Night Football games (Howard, Frank and Dandy Don, of course). The Golf Channel gives the viewer live coverage of European events, and all the NationWide Tour; football fans are going to be stuck with A Portrait in Pride: the 1990 Cincinnati Bengals and other chestnuts from the vault of NFL Films.