Mom and Dad have NFL Sunday Ticket, DirecTV's service that allows a person to watch every NFL game every Sunday. It's become crucial to the family's football-watching experience as we gather at Mom and Dad's house every Sunday to eat dubious amounts of Cheetos, complain about the Cardinals not improving their bullpen (even when the baseball season is long completed), and most importantly of all--we watch our teams lose.

And Dad roots for Brett Favre, even if we're watching a game that Favre's not even playing in.

It all started back in the late 1990s when Dad got satellite TV and the NFL Sunday Ticket so my brother and I could watch our beloved, but grossly out-of-market Philadelphia Eagles. The only times the Eagles had even a remote chance of appearing on local TV were if they played the Rams, which usually worked out well for the Eagles, or if they were in the 3:00 game against Dallas, which was never much fun to watch because Dallas buried the Eagles time after time. With the acquisition of the new Sunday Ticket, we were able to watch the Eagles get buried by a much wider variety of foes, along with a chance win against the Redskins or some other bums here and there. On top of that, Dad also got the satellite to get access to Fox Sports Midwest, which meant we could watch the Cardinals pretty much every day instead of the one or two times every few weeks that Fox Saturday Baseball would carry a game (and our antenna couldn't get Channel 11 in St Louis). Unfortunately, the only thing the Cardinals had going for them in those days was Mark McGwire, which was fun to watch, but the team wasn't all that competitive. Ron Gant, Jeff Brantley and Ricky Bottalico just didn't work out as well as everybody hoped they would.

Anyway, once the initial excitement of being able to watch Eagles games passed after a couple of seasons, we realized that in addition to watching the Eagles, we could watch any other game we wanted, as well. During any commercial breaks or halftime, we started recklessly channel surfing through the rest of the games, trying to see a little bit of everything before the Eagles came back on. I got so bad about this that I would sometimes change the channel right in the middle of an ongoing play and miss the outcome altogether, typically drawing the ire of everybody else in the room. Hey, I was in a hurry to get back--I didn't have time to wait around and see if Curtis Martin was going to run for two yards or five yards. After checking out the action around the league, we'd get back to the Eagles game and find that usually we didn't get back in time, and we always ended up missing some crucial play--you know, like an Eagles fumble or Eagles interception or an Eagles missed field goal. Something like that.

Come 1999, the Eagles took a bit of a backseat to the Rams, who were suddenly on an incredible tear with some dude named Kurt Warner at the helm. It became apparent that some situations were going to arise in which we were going to need to watch two games at the same time. Well, running between two rooms in the house was impractical and involved getting up from a seated position, which was far too much movement for me in those lazy days, and there was always the off-chance that I might trip over a cord or table leg, too.

So Dad came up with a better solution: picture-in-picture. I'd only ever used this previously overlooked feature on our televisions once, when I wanted to watch California wildfire coverage and play Super Metroid on Super Nintendo at the same time. But now, the proposition of being able to watch two games at the same time and easily swap between them meant picture-in-picture finally earned a place in my heart. And even when the Rams and Eagles weren't on at the same time, the PIP still proved useful for watching baseball or other football games at the same time our teams were on.

It's just funny to look back and think about how much technology has changed our game-watching habits, even in my short lifetime. Not only can we now watch pretty much any game we want, but the presentation of the game has evolved so much, as well. Back when I first started watching football, the score, down, and clock would all only flash on the screen every now and then. Now it's all there all the time. And it was an amazing breakthrough when they started showing the scores of other games during the game we were watching. Then they added the little chime so we knew the scores were about to appear. And now those scores are flashing on the screen pretty much all the time, too. A lot of these advances are really great additions to the experience, but I also think some of the stuff they show is a little excessive. Have you noticed on ESPN baseball telecasts how at the top of the screen, they show a batter's average, home runs and RBIs for each individual count. They'll show his average for a 0-0 count, then an 0-1 count, then a 1-1 count, and so on. That's maybe only overdoing it a little bit there, guys. I don't need to see up-to-the-second stats, or a bunch of arrows and numbers superimposed on the field, or what personnel is on the field (a Sunday Night Football thing), or anything like that. Just give me the score, down, clock, and maybe some scores from around the rest of the league every now and then.

Although, I must admit I'm a sucker for the first-down "yellow line."