Thursday, April 16, 2009

Um…see all those people eating Matzos?

Evidently the NFL scheduling wizards forgot to look out of their windows onto the streets of New York City to see all of my Jewish brothers and sisters observing the sacred period of Pesach (Passover) this week. You see if they had they may have remembered that a decent percentage of the population of the greater tri-state area is indeed Jewish. And being even semi observant to the faith means that on certain occasions there are things you don’t do (or don’t miss doing as the case may be).

Included in this is attending services during the High Holy Days (Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur). The challenge the NFL faced this year are that both holidays fall smack dab on Sundays during football season. For that reason both the NY Giants and the NY Jets asked the NFL not to schedule them for home games those days. The rationale was that the teams did not want to offend/upset/irk/or otherwise bother their season-ticket holders who are of the “faith” to have to decide between being pious and missing the home games or being fans and missing their religion. The idea being that if both teams played road games it wasn’t going to be a financial loss to the fans (this is where I indicate that as a Jew if you sold your tickets to the game on a holiday it would be almost as bad as going to the game itself. Very frowned upon.)

But as you guessed, the league didn’t quite get the message. Oh the Giant games those weeks are on the road, no problem, but somehow the letter from the Jets front office got lost in the NFL HQ mailroom (must have been Michael J. Fox….I never trusted him as a mail clerk…or Christopher Murney for that matter.)

Note to the league… if either of these two holiday’s falls on a Sunday…make sure both NY teams are on the road….it really isn’t that hard to figure out.

Jews out.

1 comment:

Unknown said...

Clearly the Jets...just like the Mets are 2nd class citizens here in NYC! :)

Btw...I looked at the Yankees sked and they play the Red Sox at home on the 27th (Kol Nidre), but the game is at 1:00pm. Looks like I'll be running from the New Cathedral to Synagogue.