Cold discomfort

It's supposed to be zero degrees with a windchill of minus-30 in Kansas City tonight, and as a fan of Football The Way It Oughta Be -- outdoors, under God's sky, battling the elements as well as the opponent -- I am all for that.

I want to see Patrick Mahomes try to throw a football with the aerodynamic properties of a brick, and see Travis Kelce try to catch it.

I want to see the Miami Dolphins yelping "What the (BLEEP)!!" for three solid hours.

I want to see the Ice Bowl, the Frozen Tundra Bowl, the Frostbite's Just Another Word For Survive And Advance Bowl.

Final score of the latter: Kansas City 5 Lost Fingers, Miami 4 Lost Toes.

Unfortunately (or fortunately) I won't see any of that.

I won't see it because I'm a stubborn old coot, and because the NFL is a grasping Mr. Potter squeezing every dime 'til its lung collapse. I won't see it because the NFL, a $12 billion industry with more money than God, is putting a playoff game on Peacock, which is the pay-per-view streaming vehicle for NBC. 

Thus we have the answer to the age-old question "How much is enough?"

The NFL's answer: "Define 'enough'."

So, no, I won't be paying NBC, and the NFL, a few extra dollars so I can see Andy Reid turn into Frozen Jack Nicholson on the Chiefs' sideline. And, no, I don't care how few those dollars are.

A man has to draw the line somewhere. And this is where I draw it.

And, yes, I know we started down this road a long time ago, when ESPN and other cable entities started buying up the rights to bowl games and playoff games and even the  Stanley Cup Final, which was aired on TNT, TBS and Tru last year. Or you could shell out a few dollars for Sling and watch it there.

Heck. You can even go further back than cable, if you're of a mind to. Maybe this really all started when boxing started putting all its big fights on pay-per-view. And that happened, when, the 1970s? The 1960s?

I did the pay-per-view thing one time, and never again. One of my friends convinced a few of us to kick in (if memory serves) 35 bucks apiece for the Buster Douglas-Evander Holyfield fight. It lasted about four minutes before Buster laid down and took a nap.

Never again. And that includes tonight.

The only way to put a stop to this sort of thing, in a for-profit society, is to make it unprofitable. Greed only works if you feed it, after all. And so consider tonight my lonely man's attempt to starve the greedheads of at least a few more dollars.

"Sure, like they'll miss them," you're saying now.

Yeah, well. Sometime you just gotta tilt at that windmill.