Going to the game and watching your favourite team live is up there with the best sporting experiences, unless of course your team happens to be the Minnesota Vikings or the Chicago Bears…
Unfortunately though not all of us are lucky enough to be able to get down to games regularly or to even get our hands on tickets in the first place.
The next best thing then is to watch the game action from the comfort of your own home. In this article we cover five things that should help elevate your home viewing experience, read on to find out what they are.
Lock Down the Stream
The worst thing that you can do is turn on the TV a few minutes before kick-off and not know what channel or streaming service the game is on. Ahead of time do your research and find out who is showing the game and make sure you have an active subscription.
No-one wants to spend half an hour trawling through channels, misremembering passwords and clicking on dubious live stream links that don’t work but just clog up your screen with less than salubrious advertisements.
Think ahead and you won’t miss a moment of the action.
Put Something on the Game
Not every game you watch is going to be a thrill a minute. Sometimes you need to have something else riding on the game to keep things fresh and exciting and you can do that in two ways.
The first and most common is to get involved in a fantasy football league at the beginning of the season and take it seriously. If you do you’ll find that there’s always something riding on every game you’re watching, which can really help if the game on your TV just so happens to become a war of attrition.
Secondly you can get into sports betting and try and make the most of the NFL odds. If you go for this option just be sure to set yourself a realistic budget and never go chasing your losses. The best way to have fun is to make your bets based on facts and statistics. Fortunately a number of great betting apps have features that allow you to explore all the latest stats.
Research
It’s not just the pundits and commentators that should be doing their research ahead of the game, you should too. If you want to enjoy the game as much as possible, it’s helpful to read up a little bit about the opposition team ahead of time.
Who are their key players? What style of football do they tend to play? Do they have a clean bill of health or are they ravaged by injury? Knowing all of these things helps you better understand the game unfolding in front of you and it also helps to build excitement.
Snack Stations
You’re going to get hungry during the game as it can be a long old slog watching NFL at times. The last thing that you’re gonna want to do is spend half an hour in the kitchen rustling up a meal because you’re starving or spend money you don’t have on a pizza delivery.
Head to the store the night before the game and pick up all your favourite snacks and drinks. Even throw in a frozen pizza or too and before the game make sure that you have everything on hand for when the game starts.
Airplane Mode
Everything has a downside and one huge downside of internet based streaming is that no-one is watching at the exact same time anymore. What do we mean by that? Well back in the old days when we all watched football on TV, when a touchdown was scored it happened at exactly the same time on my TV screen as someone halfway across the country’s.
Now because of buffering, connection issues and time delays your friend in Florida could see your team score a touchdown 30 seconds before you or even longer than that. And nothing kills the buzz quite as much as when you get a text from your friend that serves as a spoiler to the on-field action.
To avoid that, turn your phone on airplane mode during the game and instead keep your texting to the breaks in play.
