Ahead of kickoff for the 2023 National Football League’s regular season, football fans around the country are making the decision whether or not to sign up for NFL Sunday Ticket, which is on YouTube TV for the first time. The out-of-market sports package had been available exclusively through DIRECTV since its launch in 1994. Google and the NFL agreed to a seven-year deal reportedly worth just over $2 billion per season, and there have been a litany of promotions for users to sign up.
Despite trying to put it off for a long time, Fred Toucher is finally giving in and plans to sign up for NFL Sunday Ticket in the near future. As a fan of the New York Jets and Detroit Lions, the Boston sports radio host is preparing for the upcoming season and will navigate through the onboarding process for the lucrative package.
“I know they had an early bird special that I didn’t take advantage of,” Toucher said Wednesday on 98.5 The Sports Hub. “There are games – I don’t know if I’d watch them anyway – they’re good games, some of them, that I’m just not going to see. I will get the YouTube Sunday Ticket because I like out-of-market teams.”
Toucher watches a considerable amount of NFL action for the show each week and knows he can more effectively tell the story of the matchup by watching the game in its entirety instead of highlights. He also recognizes that access to every NFL game could change what is expected of him from Toucher & Rich listeners.
“Jon [Wallach] is selling out this year and not getting it because he’s just going to stay completely localized,” Toucher said. “Whenever it comes to Jon talking about any game that wasn’t on TV locally, you can’t listen to him.”
Toucher plans to watch every snap new quarterback Aaron Rodgers takes with the Jets this season, his first away from the Green Bay Packers in his 18-year NFL career. Since he hosts shows in Boston, he will also tune in to the New England Patriots to ensure he can effectively carry out his job.
“Now the responsibility completely falls on me,” Toucher said. “When the Jets are in the Super Bowl, you guys are going to be sitting here scrambling going, ‘What the hell’s going on?,’ and I’m going to have to be like, ‘Dude, you didn’t see Week 3? You didn’t sit there from the beginning to end of Week 3?’”
While NFL Sunday Ticket includes out-of-market games on linear television, it does not include any of the Peacock or ESPN+ exclusive contests. Earlier in the year, the NFL announced that Peacock would be the exclusive home of a playoff game in the Wild Card round. Fans of the local teams will be able to see the action on networks to be determined, but other football fans will need to watch through NBCUniversal’s streaming service.
“If they made it to where you actually had to spend money to watch a playoff game, that’s pretty low,” Rich Shertenlieb said. “I don’t see them doing that, [and] I could see the backlash biting them in the ass.”
