I love the late games. It feels like Cream not Crowd. The Crowd teams are crammed into those 1 PM games and all the scores blend. Then the showcase games are 4 PM with less competition.
At least that's the way it used to be. The elite teams were always saved for the 4 PM showcase games. The trend was blatant in the late '60s when the AFL and NFL each had doubleheaders every week. The 1 PM games would always be filler like the Boston Patriots vs. the Dolphins on NBC, and the Redskins vs. Eagles on CBS, then all the big shots competed at 4 PM. You'd have some combination of the Packers and the Cowboys and the Rams and Colts on CBS NFL, while the NBC AFL was among the Jets and Chiefs and Raiders and Chargers, who were flashy with John Hall and Lance Alworth.
Awesome. It was a treat every week. There were no primetime games to steal away the Cream teams, so you saw them at 4PM every Sunday. My family would set two televisions side by side in the Florida room. Keep in mind this was prior to remote control. Actually my dad got remote control in 1970, just in time for the merger. We were first in the neighborhood. All the neighborhood kids and even some adults would come to our house to see the clicker and figure out how to use it.
Big stuff
Then early '70s the Miami area was incredibly frustrated when the Dolphins were relegated to the 1 PM games far too long, even after they had obviously surged under Shula. Once you reached 4 PM level that meant the supreme NBC announcing team of Curt Gowdy and Al DeRogatis. It was so amazing in those early '70s when the Dolphins finally were advanced to the 4 PM slotting and also the Monday Night showcase with Cosell, Meredith and Gifford. It felt like the entire country was watching. Then when it was an obscure 1 PM game against some Crap team it didn't feel the same. The Dolphins thankfully would use Csonka to grind out those games in methodical fashion and finish at 3:35 PM so there was still plenty of time to grab a snack or something prior to the 4 PM theater.
The only time I disliked the late games was when I lived in Las Vegas and was teaming with two other guys in a high stakes betting group. What a pain in the ***. Johnny Avello at Bally's would put up the early numbers for the following week's games at 3 PM Pacific, which meant it was still during the second half of those late games. I had to be there every week for years. So I'm watching the games and sweating out my wagers at the same time I've got to check out the new numbers and decide what to pounce on. Keep in mind we weren't wagering 50 bucks. I'd have to decide on whether or not to bet 10 dimes. If it was a good deal we wanted the maximum, which was 10 dimes. Then it's amusing as hell when I make those bets and go to the pay phone down the hall at Bally's to call my two buddies and tell them what I ended up with. They fully trusted me. That's why I was there. In all the years I only really made one mistake, where I grabbed a number for the limit that wasn't a great number. But often I'd josh with them, by reading out a supposed wager I made. I'd invent a terrible number on some game and tell them I got it. One of the two guys always knew I was kidding. So he'd laugh. But the other guy Dave was paranoid, so he's go absolutely nuts every time, screaming at me in a high pitched voice. Finally I convinced the sharp guy to restrain laughter so we'd both get to enjoy Dave's implosion.