Greetings from the sports desk located somewhere below decks of the Good Pirate Ship RedState. Sammy the Shark and Karl the Kraken are in full September mode, with baseball in post-season positional maneuvering plus pro and pro junior ... er, college football up and running. Around the middle of the month, hockey training camps are opening. Are they ready?

As ready as they’ll ever be.

We focus on the NFL and its amazing ability to follow an excellent idea with the exact opposite. Good idea: start the season with a Thursday night, prime-time rematch of last season's AFC championship game between the eventual Super Bowl champion Kansas City Chiefs and Baltimore Ravens. The game drew massive ratings and provided maximum entertainment, with one, unfortunately out of bounds toe keeping us from a two-point conversion to determine the winner with no time left on the clock.

Labeling this game a likely precursor of the 2025 AFC championship game is tempting, but both teams evidenced some weaknesses that could preclude a January reunion should someone else in the AFC step up. Although nominally better than last year, the Chiefs receiving corps still comes off as one Patrick Mahomes wins in spite of, not alongside, while Baltimore's offensive line was very offensive. When Lamar Jackson's preferred play call is "hut hut hike, watch me run for my life," the likelihood of him not prematurely ending the season via injury is conspicuous.

If the Thursday night game was a good idea, the Friday night game was anything but. The matchup in and of itself was solid (Packers and Eagles), but the location ... São Paulo, Brazil? Really? What, Venezuela didn't have a soccer stadium it could flip into an American football field? Hope nobody on either team tweeted about it.

Adding a second insult to injury — Packers quarterback Jordan Love suffered an apparent leg injury at game's end — was the inability of fans to watch the game. Since ticking off the fans in Green Bay or Philadelphia, where the NFL would have held the game had sanity reigned, was insufficient, the NFL aggravated football everywhere else in the country by sticking the broadcast on NBC's Peacock streaming-only subscription service. 

So, to watch national broadcasts, an NFL aficionado now needs ESPN (Monday night), Amazon Prime (Thursday night), and Peacock-- for whenever its parent network decides to slide a broadcast its way. It is now more expensive to watch the NFL at home than it is to be a season ticket holder, and that's not including YouTube's Sunday Ticket plan for the diehards who want to watch every game or follow their favorite team if it isn't the local squad.

Making matters worse? The field was terrible.

A number of players lost their footing during the game and later attributed it to the slick surface at Arena Corinthians, which is normally a soccer stadium. For the Eagles, it stirred some not-so-great recent memories.

"It kind of reminded me of the Super Bowl turf," said tight end Dallas Goedert, referencing the surface in Arizona when the Eagles lost to the Kansas City Chiefs in Super Bowl LVII.

"I mean, y'all saw out there that it was kind of rough to get traction," Eagles quarterback Jalen Hurts said. "Definitely challenging on that field. It's not the type of field we're used to playing on. We've had that type of field before. They had to play on it as well. I'm just happy that we found a way to figure it out as a team, overcome it."

Way to put player safety first, NFL.

Seriously, do enough people outside the United States truly care about American football to make overseas games a good idea? NFL commissioner Roger Goodell wants as many at 16 games a season played elsewhere. Major cash is coming into the NFL's coffers from such endeavors; otherwise, the league would not entertain such thoughts. But here's a wild thought: how about taking care of your existing fans and stop treating them as nothing more than fund providers for your societal engineering experiments? We already have the government for that.

Finally, save Friday night for high school football. Period.