Extra prime-time games expand the football-watching experience for Cowboys fans this season

It’s astonishing how much technology has advanced over the last few decades. Artificial Intelligence is upon us. 5G networks have sped up communications. Even the internet itself has been such a game-changer that it’s hard to imagine what life was like before it. There once was a time when some of us older fans would sit around the television at 0:28 or 0:58 past the hour watching the ESPN scoreboard scroll across the bottom of the screen so we could get an update on a game we couldn’t watch. Our kids will never know our struggle.

As a fan of the Dallas Cowboys who didn’t live in the Texas area, TV games were a luxury for me, not the norm. Fortunately, the Cowboys were all the craze in the ‘70s earning the moniker “America’s Team” which meant they graced our television sets more than the average team. On those disappointing weeks where they weren’t the game televised, you’d have to look for alternative means. Sometimes a blowout might bless us with bonus coverage at the end of the game. Other times you had to rely solely on game breaks and post-game shows to learn how things ended up.

This wasn’t a problem for local fans as the Cowboys were always on, but as we know, this fanbase extends all across the country. I’m in the Pacific Northwest, the founder of this website is on the East Coast, and so many others are spread out all over the nation. For us non-locals, there was a time when watching a Cowboys game wasn’t a weekly occurrence.

But alas, those days are gone. Watching any football game you want is now an option. The Sunday Ticket provided fans with the ability to watch any game you want whether it’s your local team or an out-of-market game. Of course, everything comes with a price and as more and more companies capitalize on the cash cow that is NFL football, games are being broadcast all over the place. First Amazon Prime, then Peacock and Paramount Plus, and now even Netflix is getting in on the action.

We all have our method of watching football games, but some of us just take what we’re given. When the Cowboys are broadcast nationally, great. If not, they either miss out or hit the local sports bar. For those fans who aren’t diseased by the compulsion of watching every snap of every game, but rather rely exclusively on nationally televised games, you are in luck. The Cowboys are on TV a lot this year.

This season, the Cowboys will be the only game being broadcast seven times. Those instances consist of three Sunday night games, two Monday night games, and two Thursday games. That’s a total of six prime-time games and one turkey day game. Here is the full list of all of these games.

• WEEK 4, Thursday night, September 26th against the New York Giants (Amazon Prime)
• WEEK 5, Sunday night, October 6th against the Pittsburgh Steelers (NBC)
• WEEK 8, Sunday night, October 27th against the San Francisco 49ers (NBC)
• WEEK 11, Monday night, November 18th against the Houston Texans (ESPN)
• WEEK 13, Thursday Thanksgiving, November 28th against the New York Giants (FOX)
• WEEK 14, Monday night, December 9th against the Cincinnati Bengals (ESPN)
• WEEK 16, Sunday night, December 22nd against the Tampa Bay Buccaneers (NBC)

Also, that’s not counting the handful of Sundays when the Cowboys will be the game of the week on either FOX or CBS that isn’t replaced by a game from a team in your area. If you a non-local fan who only watches the Cowboys whenever they’re televised, then you’ll be in for a bigger treat this season than what you normally get.

And it’s just not the out-of-towners who will benefit from this surplus of prime-time games. The locals win here as well. If you love to see action from other games, more Sunday afternoons are open since the Cowboys will be slated in the evening. For fantasy football junkies or Red Zone enthusiasts, your football-watching experience expands this season.

If you’ve ever seen a teenager text while driving, your appreciation for self-driving cars will increase, and no longer are we bothered by trying to figure out what movie so-and-so was in because Google hadn’t been invented yet. Those are advances in technology we can appreciate, but never missing another Cowboys game is certainly on that list too. Whether or not you take full advantage of what technology has to offer, we can all benefit from the popularity of the Cowboys and the extra prime-time games they have this season.