ESPN Begins the Enshittification of NFL Sundays

By Jacob Weindling | September 4, 2025 | 7:59am

Photo via screenshot of ESPN

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ESPN Begins the Enshittification of NFL Sundays

Life these days is a constant string of indignities, all in the name of someone else’s profit. We all have to deal with metric tons of nonsense each day simply because that’s the way things are and that’s where capital’s incentives are aligned. Products aren’t meant to be enjoyed, but purchased, and if you enjoy something too much, you won’t need to purchase it again, and then all of a sudden Instant Pot is filing for bankruptcy because it makes too good of a product. Capitalists can’t have that, hence the increasing enshittification of the world around us, forcing a constant stream of consumption of shittier and shittier products on the American people. Google is perhaps the avatar for the enshittification of everything, as it created a revolutionary product that momentarily diverted traffic away from Google and built them an empire, then they decided that they actually liked being evil and were better off just keeping everyone on their homepage reading ads and AI summaries that lie to you while putting the entire digital media industry out of business.

But football is sacred. Fall and winter Sundays are holy days in America, because those are the days we all watch people give each other brain damage for fun. In 2009, the greatest advancement for football since the forward pass was created in NFL RedZone, and then ESPN did what ESPN does and bought it and ruined it. “Seven hours of commercial free football starts now” is—was—one of the greatest phrases in sports, and now RedZone’s signature greeting is no more. ESPN is bringing commercials to NFL RedZone, destroying the thing that made it so beloved in the first place. It’s just a matter of time now until we all have to put up with Pat McAfee’s unfunny shtick of slandering college girls and “ruining” their lives on RedZone, and I’m sure at that point, the commercials will feel like a reprieve worth looking forward to.

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Of all the professional sports, football has by far the most dead time. There are roughly 12 minutes of game action in a 60-minute football game, and the commercials are endless. It can make staying engaged with a game difficult, because if you have it on in the background, it can often sound like you just have a rolling loop of commercials playing, and no one wants that. TV is a trick that advertisers try to pull on us, where the content, be it news (or “news”), sports, entertainment—whatever—is simply just a vehicle to usher your eyeballs to the real reason TV exists: advertisements.

But RedZone stood athwart the tides of history and said nay, these people have to deal with enough ads for this year’s 400th different blowout sale at their local Nissan dealer. They have suffered greatly, having to sit through four hours of Chris Collinsworth interspersed with cheesy beer ads insulting their intelligence every Sunday night, and so during the afternoon, football fans deserve a treat. RedZone was the lone sports channel you could turn to during the year and know your psyche would not be assaulted by a bunch of discount Don Drapers trying to make you buy everything under the sun, and you could just crack a cold one and watch the games.

But no more. From their abandonment of journalism to launching at best the 6th most popular sportsbook to pushing Pat McAfee into our homes every day to endlessly fucking with the scorebug to a degree where no one likes it, ESPN is dedicated to the enshittification of sports, and buying RedZone so they can put commercials on it is up near the top of their grand list of offenses against their industry.

It is becoming increasingly difficult to just sit back and enjoy the game. Every ten seconds a live betting line is posted while broadcasters encourage you to give your paycheck to DraftKings, and commercials and sponsored content are seeping into every aspect of the game while a sprawling federal investigation into prop bets and players calls into question the integrity of the games themselves. Sports are the perfect example of how mainstream American culture has no soul anymore, and it is solely driven by consumerism and fealty to the almighty dollar. There isn’t a single entity involved in the production of sports who provides any kind of service other than trying to extract the maximum profit that they can from their viewers. If you’re not buying something they’re selling, you are becoming increasingly useless to a sports world losing more and more of its principles every day, especially the NFL as most working-class people are unable to afford one of the lone shared spaces America has left. We had a good thing going with RedZone—too good for the NFL, honestly—and like everything in America these days, of course it had to go in the name of this country’s north star: corporate greed.