De-thawed corpse and Mr. Magoo-sports mogul Mike Brown is not the most beloved owner in the NFL, which is really saying something right now. But he still has fans in Pittsburgh, Baltimore, and even Cleveland, who have benefited from his leadership of the Bengals for years. In January, interception machine quarterback Carson Palmer put his crib on the market, changed his cell phone number, deleted his four square twitter app, and changed his facebook status to “available.” Mike Brown responded to all these clear signs of Palmer’s desire to move on by threatening to deprive the field hands of their supper, giving them each forty lashes, and then after soiling himself, he muttered something about controlling “the rebellion.” Mike Brown can’t quit you Carson, so come on home!

Your name is Toby, NFL.com:

“We don’t plan to trade Carson,” Brown said Monday at the NFL Spring Meeting. “He’s important to us. He’s a very fine player, and we do want him to come back. If he chooses not to, he’d retire. And we would go with Andy Dalton, the younger player we drafted, who’s a good prospect.

“Ideally, we’d have both of them. That’d be the best way to go forward. If we don’t have Carson, we’ll go with Andy.”

Ideally, Mike Brown would be removed from being the owner, like some other Cincinnati sports executives. Make no mistake, Mike Brown will burn this village in order to save it, Bengals fans. Start printing Super bowl tickets Cincinnati (downs scotch bottle, collapses in small pile of empty pill bottles and vomit).

If you were one of the lucky 1.5 million households who subscribe to the Verizon Fios television & internet services then you can now participate in a testing of some new broadcasting features for watching NFL games. The NFL is testing the ability of home users to control the game’s camera angles that they are watching on their NFL Network.

Verizon subscribers get the NFL Network as part of their basic package (unlike Comcast & Time Warner) and can change camera angles from the main feed to the sideline cam, the end zone cam, and the cable cam hovering above the field with their new Game Extra service. There is also a “quad” view showing the main feed and 3 alternate angles at once. You can even change the camera during commercial breaks so you can see what is going on on the field while the rest of America is watching commercials.

Yahoo Sports tested out the service last week and had this to say:

The ability to switch camera angles proved less useful than it sounds. While the sideline cam is, of course, located on the sideline, it does not always follow the action from the same angle. This is the actual camera used by the NFL Network, so sometimes the operator is zooming in on a particular player or the huddle or a coach on the bench to get a certain shot.

Indeed, the most entertaining part of the alternate camera angles was often the voyeuristic sense of watching close-ups of players preparing to line up or talking between snaps, images rarely seen during telecasts.

The cable cam consistently offered the most interesting angles, including a great close-up during a commercial of medical staff examining Packers quarterback Brett Favre after he injured his arm in the second quarter.

Pretty damn cool really. Too bad only 1.5 million people can use it. I would expect that Direct TV is going to get this service at some point, and hopefully if the NFL, Comcast and TWC can get their acts together and make peace we can all take advantage of this.

From Yahoo!

1) Sunday Ticket
The NFL Sunday Ticket allows viewers to pay $269 dollars a year to watch any and every game played all season, along with a few other bonus channels of coverage. A wonderful package with a catch, you need to be able to subscribe to the satellite cable service Direct TV to use it. Problem is, millions of fans cannot subscribe to Direct TV because they do not own their own homes, dont have a clear view of the south western sky or have some other obstruction preventing them from having a dish on their residence. In fact, only there are only 16 million Direct TV subscribers, a far cry from the amount of people with cable television. The NFL could allow cable companies to have this package as well, but instead has extended their exclusive contract with direct tv until 2010 for around $700 million. All of this leaves us fans who cannot get a dish and/or are unwilling to subscribe to satellite television out in the cold…or at our local sports bar.

2) NFL Network
The NFL Network was started in 2003 as a cable channel run by the NFL giving fans 24-7 NFL coverage. Starting in 2006, live football games starting being broadcast on the channel. These games would have otherwise been broadcast on free television or basic cable, but now is part of the NFL Network which is not always available to fans. Fans with Time Warner Cable do not have this channel on their lineup because the NFL wanted it to be placed on their basic cable tier and were charging $0.70 a subscriber for it. TWC wanted it on their sports tier and hasn’t placed it on any tier yet. Comcast Cable used to have the NFL Network on their extended tier, but now has moved it to their sports tier and they are charging an additional $5 – 7.95 a month for the right to watch NFL games. Both cable companies are still steaming from not having the NFL Sunday ticket and are using the NFL Network as punishment and leverage for the next bidding war for the right to the NFL Sunday Ticket. In the end…the fans cannot watch games they used to be able to watch and no one in the NFL cares.

3) Online Video Content
The NBA has it’s own YouTube channel, MLB broadcasts every game online for a fee, NHL broadcasts every game to Comcast subscribers and will allow Slingbox users to share clips online…and the NFL? The NFL now restricts online footage of it’s events to 45 seconds A DAY. Total. Those 45 seconds also must be erased from the internet after 24 hours. No game footage will be allowed on any other website besides NFL.com. If you wish to stream live games online, you must be a DirecTV subscriber with an additional $99 ($368 for the total package) to spare. Essentially, the NFL does not want you, the average Joe Sportsfan, to watch anything related to the NFL online anywhere.

4) Pre-season games
Pre-season games are exhibition games. If a fan is lucky, that fan might get to see the starting rosters for his/her favorite team for about two quarters of a four quarter game. The game in itself is meaningless, just a barometer of how practice is going and a try-out session for players hoping to latch on to the team before final roster cuts. The price for the fan to go see these games? Full regular season ticket price. You see half as much legitimate NFL action for full price. The tickets are the full price, the food is the full price, the beer is the full price, it is, for all intents and purposes, a regular season game for the fan…except you spend half the game watching players who will never play in the regular season for an NFL team. Just another way for the NFL to milk even more money from their fans.

5) Blackouts
The NFL denies fans who live in a 75 mile radius of an NFL stadium the ability to watch a live home game on television if that game is not sold out 72 hours before the start of the game. The NFL says this is because fans of winning teams go to games and fans of losing teams don’t and they want people to go to their games. This does not take into consideration fans who cannot get to the games that want to follow their home team. Think some 10 year old kid or an 85 year old grandma on welfare would like to go to the game but can’t and would still like to watch the game? Its not their fault they don’t have the ability to purchase a ticket or drive to the game, but the NFL will still prevent them, as punishment for not purchasing their tickets. The NFL hates the elderly and young alike.

Do you have any other reasons?

They finally did it. They took the NFL Network away from me. I was the proud owner of 1 Comcast Cable digital box with the digital plus service with HD…but no more. The reason why I got the digital plus was because it contained the Holy Grail of cable systems…the NFL Network. The problem is…it is no longer there. I received no message telling me I was losing this channel, no notice at all, it was stolen away from me in the dead of night, like the Colts leaving Baltimore all over again. Those sons of bitches!

Now, if i wish to enjoy to enjoy my NFL Network, I must subscribe to Comcast’s Sports and Entertainment Package. Comcast explains the change in this way:

Now Comcast customers who are NFL fans can watch the NFL Network on the Comcast Sports Entertainment Package while customers who do not wish to watch NFL games will not incur additional costs.

Excuse me? WHO THE FUCK DOES NOT WANT TO WATCH NFL GAMES? Its the most popular sport in the US!

Basically, they’re attempting to strong arm the NFL who was insisting that Comcast stick this channel on their basic or non-premium plans while still forcing Comcast to pay more money for the channel. Comcast saw their bluff, and just stuck it where they wanted. Who loses? ME.

This Chimpanzee is raging. Since both of these fuckwads are screwing me over, I’m through. Comcast will lose money from me because i’m going to ratchet down my service to the most basic of cable, since the only reason I had this plan with hundreds of channels was because the NFL Network was on it. Comcast & the NFL will lose because I am not paying extra for their channel when I already was paying extra for their channel by getting the Digital Plus plan. I’m not going to pay extra, extra for a bunch of random sports channels I don’t want.

Fuck you Comcast for making me lose one of the few channels I actually did watch…and fuck you Time Warner for Mustafa not even being given this choice by you guys not even putting the network on your cable system.

Comcast image from Legions.org
Screaming image from Ownedbyjason