Last weekend, the New Orleans Saints football team won a gripping and uplifting victory, kicking a field goal with 3 seconds on the clock. It was a bitterly fought contest, and while the overall platitudes about the resiliency of the human spirit became somewhat tedious before long, the Saints played harder than anyone expected them to given the turmoil in their lives, for the most part dominating a Carolina team many had picked to reach the superbowl.

The Saints inspiring victory earned them the cover of Sports Illustrated. Some call th15em ‘America’s new team’. Many called the victory ‘uplifting’, ‘invigorating’, and ‘a ray of sunshine for hundreds of thousands of displaced Cajuns’.

The problem is that the game ended at 4:17, which meant that hundreds of thousands of displaced Cajuns didn’t see the end.

The NFL has a rule for their Sunday games. If a channel is showing a doubleheader, as Fox was this weekend, and the second game is a ‘hometown’ game, the channel must switch to the second game no later than 15 minutes in. The theory is that no one knows if the first game will go into overtime and take an additional hour.

All of Texas is Cowboy’s Country. What we saw in Austin (and I can only assume was the same in Houston and Dallas) was Carolina kicking a field goal with 1:06 left to play, and the ensuing kickoff. Shortly afterwards, at 4:15 on the dot, we cut to 3 minutes of commercials, mostly about how exciting Fox Sports were. (Hint to the NFL: they’d be more exciting if we could see the ends of the game!) Then we went to a football field of Dallas Cowboys stretching – the game hadn’t even started yet! Instead of watching a nail-biting conclusion of a well-fought game that all of America was emotionally invested in, we got to hear Troy Aikman make small talk to fill time until the coin flip. Apparently, the Cowboys team that Parcells leads today is very different than the one that he played on. As a Cowboys fan, I can safely say that, even for us, nothing that came out of his mouth was worth occupying precious brain cells.

A “Game Break” told us the conclusion of the Saints game, and I believe the update came even before the kickoff of the Cowboys game. But getting this information via a 10 second update from James Brown instead of watching it live is kind of like getting phone sex instead of the real thing. It’s just not the same.

There are an estimated 250K evacuees in Texas right now. Many were staying in emergency housing and crappy hotels. I doubt many had access to the Sunday Ticket package that would have let them see the whole thing.

This arbitrary and ill-considered rule is something that the NFL has needed to change for a long time. Watching the end of a close game is always better than watching the beginning of a game, even without the emotional heartstrings the Saints bring to the table. I don’t know what the right fix is, but at some point it would seem that common sense needs to prevail, at least in the close games.