Next, can we please have Football Italia back?

The NFL is returning to Channel 4:

NFL football is coming home! Almost three decades after first appearing on Channel 4, the NFL is returning to its original station in a new deal to broadcast Sunday Night Football. Channel 4 will air the league's premier match-up at 1 a.m. every Sunday night, with the game kicking off at 1.20. The new season will begin with the Dallas Cowboys' trip to arch-rival Washington Redskins on September 12. [...]

I used to enjoy following the NFL back in the 1980s when Channel 4 gave the sport its first mainstream UK TV coverage. I stopped following the NFL once Channel 4 lost the rights, primarily because when Channel 5 took over the contract their coverage initially centred around their live game show in the wee small hours. I could have recorded the shows to watch during the week, but somehow I just never got into the habit. In fairness, it may also have been that the generation of players I'd become familiar with when I first encountered the sport in the early 1980s was starting to retire and I felt less of a connection with the teams than I had a few years earlier.

It'll be interesting to try to follow the sport again in the age of the internet. Back in the 1980s the Channel 4 show early on a Sunday evening would show highlights from the previous weekend's games,¹ but given the lack of coverage of the NFL in the UK mainstream media at the time it wasn't a problem to avoid finding out the results over the course of the week so I could safely catch up on the action on a Sunday night. Now that it'd be trivial to find out the weekend's scores online, will I have the willpower to hold out until the next highlights show? If I can't wait, will I end up trying to seek out game highlights on YouTube in preference to waiting for a chance to see the highlights on Channel 4?²

[Via Phil Gyford]

1. There were exceptions to that rule, with extra mid-week highlights programmes during post-season play and of course live coverage of the Superbowl, but in general Channel 4's NFL coverage existed in a time warp. ↩
2. Of course, we don't have full details of Channel 4's coverage yet: it's quite possible that they'll put on a highlights show in midweek in addition to their live game coverage. ↩