With the start of the pro football season just around the corner you might be getting ready to face off against your wife like a couple of linebackers having a staring contest across the line of scrimmage. She has apparently decided that Sundays are meant for religious observation, cleaning house, and enjoying family time. Your idea of a religious experience, however, involves watching Tim Tebow kneel and pray after a touchdown, the only cleaning you want to see is from the offensive line of the Green Bay Packers as they clean the clocks of the Chicago Bears, and family time for you means reconnecting with your bro Peyton Manning as he makes his Broncos début. Of course, you might be one of those lucky few who have a wife that is just as interested in the goings-on of the gridiron as you are. In either case, you may want to think about downloading a handy little app from the iTunes store called NFL Sunday Ticket by DirecTV.

You might have noticed that the app comes to you direct from DirecTV. So although it’s free to download you will have to buy the programming through your cable provider (which will obviously have to be DirecTV) before you can access the content on your favorite iDevices. And that will set you back about 300 smackers ($299.95, to be precise) for the NFL Sunday Ticket Max package that allows you to watch games both at home and on the go. It may not be cheap, but for the diehard football fanatic there is a lot to love in this comprehensive application.

Consider for a moment what their tagline for this package, “Every game. Every Sunday.” entails. You’ll have access to as many as 16 games every Sunday for the 17 weeks of the regular season (as well as pre-season games for Max subscribers). You can check the schedule to see who’s playing, watch live streams of games and switch between them (since many air during the same hours), view highlights of games in progress, and check scores and view updated stats throughout the day. Also provided in the app is the NFL’s RedZone Channel, which brings you updates, highlights, breakdowns, and analysis of every Sunday game.

But even with all these features, most football fans will probably agree that the major draw is access to every out-of-market game. So you no longer have to limit yourself to watching local teams on local feeds. L.A. transplants jonesing for a glimpse of their hometown team playing live (be it the New York Giants, the Dallas Cowboys, or the Minnesota Vikings) can get nostalgic, business travelers can keep up with the scoreboard from the boardroom, and any husband that isn’t allowed to have the tube on throughout the day can pop into the bathroom to view highlights every hour or so (blame it on the leftover casserole!). In short, this app could just provide devoted fans with the best alternative to shelling out the big bucks for NFL tickets on sale now (which would still limit them to local games). So if you’re already planning to pay for the NFL Sunday Ticket package from DirecTV, you might as well take it to the Max and make the experience mobile.

Editor’s Note

Thanks to Evan Fischer for this guest post. He is a freelance writer and part-time student at California Lutheran University in Thousand Oaks, California.

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