After a long day, you kick off your shoes, crack open a beer, turn on Fox News or CNN or MSNBC for some politics.
You shouldn't have to worry you'll be blindsided by someone injecting sports into the conversation.
Sure, everyone has their teams, and that's fine. But how many of us lately have had to start avoiding certain friends, co-workers or relatives because they won't shut up about their fantasy teams, moaning about a missed call or bad trade, rubbing our face in the fact their team won?
Shouldn't politics be a safe haven from all of that, insulated from the partisan world of sports? It increasingly isn't. Maybe it never was. But at least people used to try to keep their sports to themselves.
It should have been easy Friday. There certainly was no shortage of politics to discuss, what with poll results in Alabama, the rivalry with North Korea getting more heated, Puerto Rico facing a big rebuilding job, the latest Obamacare bout in Congress, parsing Robert Mueller's apparent game plan and the usual trade rumors and media trash talk.
But at a campaign rally, some political figure mentioned pro football and offered a call to action, and there went the weekend.
It's understandable on one level: The person who brought it up plays golf and once owned a professional football team. Unfortunately, to borrow an expression, everyone took the ball and ran with it, as if sporting events were the only place people come together to hear the national anthem.
Sports was suddenly all anyone wanted to talk about. "Meet the Press," "Face the Nation," all of them, it was NFL this and NFL that. There was also talk about baseball and politics, and basketball and politics, too, though it's not even basketball season yet.
Who wants to hear John Dickerson talking sports? That's not his job. Yes, Chuck Todd's "MTP" predecessor Tim Russert would sometimes mention his love for the Buffalo Bills, but Todd is no Tim Russert.
This isn't what draws us to politics, why we love it and keep coming back to it. Grandstanding, we can take, just leave the grandstands out. We want coverage focused on the horse race, not horse racing; inside baseball, not baseball; slam-dunk legislation, not slam dunks.
Punting a question is one thing, punting a football quite another.
This threatens to take all the fun out of politics. Let's try to remember the game at hand.
No one tuning in a White House news conference wants to hear criticism of ESPN. That's where we turn to get criticism of CNN. Let's stay in our lanes, people.
Back in the sports world: The chief beneficiaries of President Donald Trump's anti-NFL comments and tweets were the NFL pregame shows, which focused on the controversy. Combined, CBS' and Fox's lead-in shows were up 19 percent from a year ago.
The NFL numbers for Week 3 are expected to be up year-to-year after ESPN's "Monday Night Football" Cardinals-Cowboys ratings are added to the mix. It helps that the third "MNF" game last season ran opposite the first Trump-Clinton presidential debate.
Early estimates found Sunday's numbers were a mixed bag, the combined ratings for games on CBS, Fox and NBC down about 4 percent.
Boosted by close games, CBS' doubleheader showed a 4 percent improvement in the overnight ratings of top markets, including an 11 percent increase for its early afternoon regional telecasts. Its games overall averaged 11.9 percent of the nation's TV households and a quarter of all those with their TVs on.
Fox's regional games were down 16 percent, with 10.3 percent of TV households and 22 percent share of those watching TV.
NBC's lopsided Redskins-Raiders bore in prime time was down 11 percent with a 12.9 household rating and 20 percent share.
The tight Rams-49ers game Thursday night, which preceded Trump's remarks about the player protests during the anthem to bring attention to police treatment of minorities, was up 38 percent from the same week in 2016 and 7.4 million viewers from a week earlier.
Even with the declines, the NFL is reliably a top TV draw.
