I’ve grown accustomed to watching most sporting events a certain way. To write and podcast about sports, I have, rather, I get to watch a lot of sports. The thing is, though, that I don’t watch most sports live.
I love to read, I love to write, I love to walk, and, man, I love to watch my sports games after they’ve been recorded. I can fast-forward through commercials and fast-forward through halftime. It’s delightful, and it’s the overwhelming winner, for me, as to how I prefer to watch my sports.
Except, it does not work that way during football season. I watch most of my football games live. I have to watch most of my games live. Every weekend, I watch the Tennessee Volunteers and Atlanta Falcons live, and mostly every other college football and NFL game that I’m fascinated by the same way – live.
At 35 years old, football is the last sport standing that I will continue to watch live consistently. I love basketball, baseball, et cetera, but I love burning through an Atlanta Hawks game in two hours and continuing with my day or evening. When my wife and I vacationed in Maui a couple of summers ago, one of my first thoughts was how perfect the time zone difference was for sports fans, particularly retired sports fans. We were six hours behind, and man, I’d love to knock out the forthcoming Falcons game heartbreak before I’ve had my third cup of coffee.
Alas, that is not how things work back in East Tennessee. Indeed, the last Tennessee football game I missed live was against Akron in 2022 and for good reason – I married my lovely wife that third Saturday in September. Part of the reason football stands alone, particularly the Vols and the Falcons, is how impossible it is to avoid spoilers. If I don’t watch the football games I want to watch live, then and there, man, it is hard in 2026 to avoid the scores before I settle in and watch the taped game. I am in a couple of different group chats, and it is pretty dang hard to keep from reading through them before I’ve watched the game they’ve all spent the last several hours reacting to.
I also do enjoy participating in those group chats during the games, as it adds another fun element to the game while I take my notes on my trusted yellow Legal pad. The trade-off is so many additional commercials, instant replays, halftime shows, et cetera, that I breeze through the rest of the sports calendar that I have no choice but to sit through in the fall during football season. (But, man, it would be nice if most Tennessee football games could be closer to two-hour events than four-hour events. College football games, and the closing minutes to most college basketball games, are far too long.)
I don’t have this problem for most other sporting events, outside of watching the NBA on Peacock, where watching recorded games, or even starting a game that already started from the beginning, is not a thing, somehow. (Watching Tennessee baseball games on ESPN+ behind or taped can also be an adventure.) I watch the Hawks, the Atlanta Braves, the NBA, the NHL Playoffs, and every other sporting event that I’m interested in on delay or already recorded. It’s a great way for a sportswriter who watches a lot of sports to live.
This is just not how it works during football season, but I love football season. I love football Saturdays in the South, even more so since I moved to Knoxville to attend the University of Tennessee for graduate school nearly six years ago. In a way, I think watching most everything else after the fact has made football season more fun. I never feel like an Atlanta Hawks season or a Tennessee baseball season flies by, but there hasn’t been a year that an Atlanta Falcons season or a Tennessee football season hasn’t felt like it has flown by. There are just over a handful of games played in Neyland Stadium every year, and I appreciate every one of them the best way I know how at this time in my life – I watch them all live.
But it takes some getting used to. I really love watching my sports games after the fact, with no spoilers, of course. I love efficiently moving through a game and having more time to hang out with my wife and read my books. I love sports, and I love watching them, but I don’t love watching them live, for most of the year, anyway. Football season is different. High school football, college football, and the NFL, it’s all the same to me – I watch the games I want to watch live.
We’ve got a little over a couple of months to go until I transition into being a Live Sports Guy again. Late August and early September will be here before I know it, and my time as a Taped Sports Guy will be pushed aside for a while. (Outside of the Braves and the MLB postseason, of course.) Still, I’ve come to love and appreciate both times of the year in the sports calendar. I love watching most of my sports games on delay, and I do envy the sports fans on Hawaii-Aleutian Standard Time, but I do love watching football live, too, ven if I’m never really ready for it.