The Most Indispensable Apps for Football Season

The game of football, and the media surrounding it, has kept pace with technology and changed a lot over the course of the past few decades. For example, back in your old man’s heyday, he got the local game plus whatever bonus game (note that that’s singular) the networks dictated for him. Now you can stream half a dozen broadcasts as you sit on the toilet. What a time to be alive.

Take advantage of the era in which you live. There are a number of programs you can download right now to enhance your football viewing experience, because simply watching your favorite team, and then killing time to learn what happened in the rest of the league from a highlight show or, god forbid, a freaking newspaper, is something more apt for the Neanderthals who roamed the earth back in 1998.

Fortunately you don’t have to suffer like them. Here are The Most Indispensable Apps for Football Season.

An app as solid as its name is uncreative, NFL Mobile does its best to be a jack of all trades that gives you fantasy updates, replays, breaking news, and, for some users, streams of live games. Picture it as an interactive NFL Network that you can take on the go, which seems as strong a descriptor as any because you can watch NFL Network on the go. For a few extra bucks per month, you can get RedZone and replays of games with Game Pass because, let’s be honest here, if the best features were free it just wouldn’t be the NFL.

While we live in the golden era of watching football, the same cannot be said of playing football video games. There’s really only one, and you either like it or you don’t. Luckily it’s a solid one from a company that’s been programming games for every platform imaginable over the past 25-plus years. Madden on your mobile device may not be on par with Madden on your TV, but it’s still miles better than killing time on your commute by staring out a subway window, reading a book, or making accidental eye contact with a stranger.

It’s highly likely that if you don’t have any of the venerable trifecta of social media apps by now, you won’t get one. But pretty much all your favorite players are on at least one of them, giving you a behind-the-scenes glimpse of their lives, all without obnoxious voiceovers and lead-ins from Robin Leach. In a world where every major athlete views themselves as a brand, these services are essential to getting direct quotes without having to sit through boring postgame interviews screened by publicists.

Thirty-five weeks out of the year you may wonder why you subscribe to DirecTV. Then football season happens and you say, “Oh, that’s right.” If you combine this app with a Sunday Ticketsubscription you can watch whichever out-of-market contest you want, making it perfect for the transplant who flew away from his home team to land a job, as well as the fan who just really, really can’t watch enough football.

If you happen to still live in the same market as your squad, you can stream the RedZone channel live, which serves as a dope picture-in-picture option if you don’t want to share your massive TV screen with a game in the lower corner.

You sit through SportsCenter and PTI and whatever other sports shows you watch to see what they have to say about the topics and teams you care about. But what if you didn’t have to watch stories about LeBron James maybe possibly starring in Space Jam 2, or Tim Tebow trying to make it as a pro baseball player? That’s where theScore app comes in, allowing you to cut through all that garbage and simply customize your feed to get updates on topics that are of interest to you. What that means is never again will you have to sit through an argument over who’s better, the Warriors or the ’95-96 Bulls, when all you want to know is if a freakin’ injury to your team’s quarterback is serious or not.

You’d have to be living in a literal cave to not know how massive the fantasy sports industry has gotten. And picking between the services of Yahoo and ESPN comes solely down to personal preference and familiarity, though sometimes we wish they’d stop trying to fix what isn’t broken. Still, both services allow you to run your own leagues, drafting, and managing your virtual team through your phone. It’s like being a commissioner/GM/owner except without all the hate, the pressure, the prestige, the money, the tax breaks—alright it’s nothing like any of those positions at all.

Assuming it hasn’t piqued the interest of legislators in your state; DraftKings (or FanDuel) is a great way to spice up a Sunday when it finally starts to get stale. 2016 may be as good as any to start playing for three reasons: 1.) It’s still below the radar of most politicians. 2.) They’ve finally made it easier for friends to set up season long leagues with one another. And 3.) This is the first football season that they’re trying to ban the multi-entry garbage from MIT dropouts who use algorithms to plug a thousand lineups every week and ruin any chance us average mopes have of winning.

If you, like me, happen to prefer the college game over the pro version, the WatchESPN app will give you access to the truly bonkers amount of NCAA showdowns that grace ESPN’s networks every Saturday. In addition to watching your team anywhere around the country, you get a special bonus in the form of shows like Monday Night Football, PTI, SportsCenter, College Gameday, or *shudders* First Take, which can make the time fly by in any airport terminal, business meeting, or boring wedding ceremony.