NFLs mistreatment of fans creating once unfathomable ticket reality

For those of us who thought we’d never live to see the day, mazel tov! We made it!There it was, last Sunday on Fox, during the Commanders-Giants game: an advertisement to purchase this season’s Giants tickets!Heck, the Giants have joined the Jets in immediate ticket-sales neediness, both after decades of waiting lists to be fortunate enough to annually spend a bundle to suffer bad teams, bad games, bad weather, increased TV commercial delays and baited-and-switched kickoff times to milk even more TV bucks.But Roger “It’s All About Our Fans” Goodell and his “good investments” PSLs — his claim remains, to me, a false financial claim for which he should have been prosecuted — TV-money-dictated kickoff times, and increasingly unpleasant and more costly stadium experiences joined to ensure the inevitable “enough is enough.”And NFL telecasts and the NFL Network choose the worst-behaved, shirtless, drunken attendees to cameo as the NFL’s most favored and preferred customers.Besides, with the NFL now increasingly tethered to team and league-partnered gambling, now one can go broke from the comfort of his own home.To think of the loyalists who would schlep to watch the Giants play in the Yale Bowl, Norm Snead under center, Spider Lockhart at free safety.Even during the cataclysmic gas shortage of 1973, Giants’ fans made it to New Haven then back.But the Goodell Era has made take-’em-for-granted, take-it-or-leave-it and exploitation of big and/or holiday games hidden behind TV paywalls, increasingly easy to learn from.

And civilized, eventually discriminate fans have been taught — forced to rent a hammer with which to hit themselves in their heads — to reject depositing money into the NFL’s no-returns, no-interest-paid bank.As Goodell’s end zones now remind us, “It Takes All of Us.” At least until the NFL runs low on suckers.We hold these truths to be self-evident:As we’ve entered Week 3, who will watch Chargers-Steelers on CBS becau...