faster than the blog

Individual game tickets for The New England Patriots went on sale today at 10AM and, being the rabid Pats fan that I am, I tried getting some. I logged into ticketmaster, navigated to the page for the game I was going for, and waited. At 9:59, I started refreshing the page every few seconds, waiting for the ticket sales to become active.

At 10 AM on the dot, the page became active. I selected 2 tickets, any price, best seat available. Ticketmaster went into search mode and came back a few moments later with the 'no tickets available' screen. This was approximately 10:00:40. Yes, less than 1 min after tickets had 'supposedly' gone on sale, there were no tickets available.

I tried again for several different games and got nowhere. By 10:05, I was done.

I am here to tell you that this individual game ticket thing for Joe Average Pats Fan is a big fucking scam. It's a charade I'm telling you. There are no football tickets available, they are just TELLING you that there are tickets available because they have to. Just like when you see that ad in the paper for a job you really want but when you apply for it you find out that the job was filled weeks ago, but the company was required to post the job opening anyway... What a joke.

DAMN YOU TICKETMASTER

- Ernie (got tickets?)

The NFL has decided to fold it's developmental league in Europe, 'NFL Europa,' so that the league could concentrate on it's regular season NFL games in Europe.

What? Can someone explain to me how this makes sense?

NFL Europe was a failure, losing $30 million a year and generating negligible interest overall. After starting with 10 teams in countries such as The U.K., Spain and Germany, the league ended with 6 teams, 5 of which were located in Germany. The 6th team was located in The Netherlands.

So after this stunning track record of success in Europe, the NFL has decided to try and generate interest in the game by robbing U.S. fans and taking regular season games over-seas.

In order to appease U.S. fans who are angry over losing home games to people who don't give a shit about the NFL or American Football, the NFL is considering adding a 17th game to the regular season schedule.

Fucking brilliant. Sometimes I hate the NFL.

I can understand that the league wants to expand to new markets, blah blah blah. Show me the money it's all about the quan, etc etc. but if the NFL wants to play games in Europe, play some pre-season games there, games that don't mean anything.

Don't rob U.S. fans and teams of home games and don't fuck up a teams regular season schedule / routine so you can try to generate interest in a place where nobody really cares about the game...

Stupid NFL.