Friday, August 29, 2008

Republicans Should Fear Eli Manning and Jason Campbell

After switching around from the Washington Redskins preseason game to the South Carolina-North Carolina State college football game, I turned to the Democratic National Convention to watch Barack Obama’s acceptance speech. Besides wanting to see his speech, the preseason game ended and I didn’t have that much interest in this particular college football game (particularly since South Carolina was winning big).

However, this got me thinking about next week. The Republican National Convention will end next Thursday night with John McCain’s acceptance speech. Next Thursday night also marks the beginning of the NFL season as the Washington Redskins face the New York Giants, a game that a millions of people care about as opposed to last night's games. Although the NFL and NBC moved the game to a 7:00pm Eastern Time start so it won't conflict with the speech, I think the Republican Party should be worried about the game exceeding three hours. If it is a close game after 10:00, there will be millions and millions of people who will stay with the game and not switch to see McCain’s speech. If that's the case, what will NBC do? They probably won't want to alienate viewers by switching away from the game and going to the convention (that worked so well with the Heidi game 40 years ago). What will the Republicans do? Will they delay the speech until the game ends? Will the NFL try to encourage coaches Jim Zorn and Tom Coughlin not to challenge plays to save time? Will NBC try to speed things along by showing fewer commercials? (That’s funny!) I guess the Republican Party should hope that both Manning and Campbell have excellent games with few incompletion passes so that the clock continues to move.

Let all of the conspiracy theories (both political and football) begin!

3 comments:

Rob Bluey said...

I guess you could say that things worked out quite well for McCain. That football audience was just enough to push him past Obama. His 38.9 million viewers surpassed Obama's 38.3 million.

Sean said...

Hey Rob. In case you read this, you're right in that things worked out perfectly for McCain. You can probably (partially) thank the terrible Washington offense for that! :)

Of course, when I wrote this, no one knew that Palin would give the speech that she did.

Nutriminzister said...

In case both you idiots read this: How did that work out?