NFL Sunday Ticket on YouTube TV: The Drew Magary Review

If you’ve ever lived under the tyranny of NFL regional TV scheduling, you know what a godsend NFL Sunday Ticket was when it first came on the scene nearly 30 years ago. Without Sunday Ticket, your football life was hell. You were stuck with the crappy local team or, back when the NFL blacked out games, a matinee screening of 1997’s “Kiss the Girls” starring Morgan Freeman and Ashley Judd instead. The rest of the network schedule is padded out with games from the local team’s awful division, plus a national 4 p.m. Eastern game that always involves the Dallas Cowboys, even when the Cowboys suck.

Sunday Ticket freed you — and this is the last time I use the word “free” in this review — from that regional prison. You didn’t have to watch the Arizona Cardinals every week, which was good because no one should ever be forced to do such a thing. You could pick any game you wanted, or you could tune into the Red Zone Channel, originally hosted on DirecTV by Andrew Siciliano, which toggled between the best parts of every game on the slate. This was what made the Ticket not just revolutionary when it debuted on DirecTV in 1994 but necessary for serious football fans, which is all of us. It instantly made sports bars into attractive Sunday afternoon destinations (until roughly 2:45 p.m.), and it turned any hometown fan into a fan of the entire league. Sure, it cost hundreds of dollars, but ask any fan (me) what they’d pay for the Ticket, and they’d tell you multiples of that amount.

But if you got Sunday Ticket through DirecTV (it would later be made available as an app, and Red Zone Channel would be spun off into a separate, nearly identical entity with a second host in Scott Hanson), you had to live with all of that service’s inherent flaws. You needed a satellite dish to get the signal, and not every dwelling was able/allowed to accommodate one. The signal got scrambled by inclement weather, a problem that DirecTV never bothered to fully resolve. Before the NFL saw an opportunity to sell to non-DirecTV customers, you had to sign a contract for X years of DirecTV service before even plunking down for the added cost of the Ticket to go with it: the personal seat license of football watching. Everything about the DirecTV experience felt like a necessary evil. I know because I was one of its customers for roughly 20 years.

So when the NFL left DirecTV altogether this past offseason, signing a deal with Google to put the Ticket on YouTube TV, it had the potential to make the product more inherently pleasant to experience. But is it? I watched this past Sunday to judge for myself — and also because I really wanted to watch some football.

First off, you should know the cost. Buying it apart from the YTTV basic TV package (which includes ESPN, TNT, The Joanna Gaines News Network and other familiar cable offerings), and buying it right now, is gonna you cost you more than it used to: $399, to be precise. That price goes up to $439 if you want to add in NFL RedZone, which you all but have to do. I personally switched from DirecTV to YTTV at the beginning of 2023 and took advantage of an early-bird deal that offered the Ticket and RedZone bundle for $289 total to new subscribers. This was on top of the roughly $30-plus I now save every month on its basic TV package versus DirecTV’s. So Sunday Ticket remains an expensive proposition for anyone but still offers enough conditional discounts to leave you with the same “I got a deal!” feeling you get after buying a used car.

Also, rain won’t f—k you anymore. Your internet service provider might, but at least the sight of rain clouds won’t fill you with dread any longer.

Now, let’s discuss the product itself. YTTV’s interface will be familiar to anyone who has used a streaming service, with boxes lining the top of the menu screen, featuring programs that Google’s algorithm assumes (often correctly) that you would like to watch. This includes all of the games on any given Sunday, plus NFL RedZone, plus various “multiview” combinations of four games on your TV simultaneously. Someone complained on TwiXter yesterday that they couldn’t customize the multiview, but don’t worry: YTTV offers you so many different multiview combinations on its main menu that you’ll suffer a migraine headache anyway. Multiview, regardless of combinations, is better than DirecTV’s old picture-in-picture option, and it’s good for seeing which games I want to go full screen for. But it’s not anything I’d leave on for an extended period, certainly not when I already have RedZone to watch instead. I’m 46 and have yet to become a “multiple TVs in the man cave” type of guy, but multiview scratches that itch if you happen to be one. 

For live TV, there’s a channel guide that you can opt to peruse, just as you would with basic cable, by pressing the LIVE button on the menu. But the longer I’ve had YTTV, the more I’ve been able to wean myself off my old cable reflexes, going straight to what I want instead of hunting around for it. I still long for a LAST CHANNEL button on my remote. I might not need a multiview of four games, but sometimes I do need to go between two games, and I only wanna have to press one button to do it.

A basic YouTube TV package comes with a DVR that it calls a “library” on the cloud, and it has no storage limit. If you have a favorite team, YTTV will ask if you want to add its Sunday Ticket games to your library, and then it will record all of them. This is much easier than it was with DirecTV, when I had to either search for my team — searching for anything on DirecTV’s slow-as-molasses main menu was always an ordeal — or hunt around the 700 level of the channel guide and record each game, each week. I also had to opt in for recording an extra hour or two past the game’s time slot, just to make sure the recording didn’t cut off at the two-minute warning. There are no such time slots with this new interface; you always get the complete game, start to finish. But the fast-forward controls on YTTV remain a touch wonky, so I’m never entirely certain if I’ve caught up to live action while watching a game from behind. Sometimes I have to switch to a different show and then switch back again to be sure.

When you queue up a recorded game, YTTV will give you the option to join live if the game isn’t over yet, to start watching from the beginning, or to catch up by watching “key plays” that have already happened, which I have so far refused to do because I am a football completist. Regardless, the danger of spoiling a game for yourself by joining it live when you didn’t mean to is now greatly reduced. Prior to this NFL season, a lot of people complained about delays on YTTV, with its live TV feed lagging a few critical seconds behind everyone else’s. Given that YTTV had several Heidi Game moments during the NBA playoffs, those complaints were more than justified. But, judging by yesterday, the lag issue appears to have been resolved. My TV and my Twitter timeline were in perfect harmony. Everyone on Twitter was still an asshole, but that’s on me for logging into the asshole factory. 

I’ve said a great many nice things about this new Ticket already, and frankly, it’s making me uncomfortable. So let me just note that a monopoly is still a monopoly. Google will almost certainly raise the price of Sunday Ticket in coming years; the NFL’s latest TV contracts with broadcast nets, which run through 2033, include a stipulation that the price of Sunday Ticket can never go “significantly” down. This is because they can. This is also because Sunday Ticket likely signals Google’s greatest effort to assert dominance over the cord-cutter market. If it acquires and folds in one of the many streaming services that are currently foundering, the price of Sunday Ticket, and of YouTube TV itself, will go up. If Larry Page and Sergey Brin each want an extra megayacht for themselves, the price will go up. If NFL owners are unhappy about Nick Bosa’s contract extension, the price will go up. And in every instance, you will have little choice but to pay it. The evil will always remain necessary.

Also, Andrew Siciliano was a better host than Scott Hanson.