The easiest ways to legally follow the NFL this season without cable

Football season is almost upon us, and that presents a problem for those of us who decided to stop paying for expensive cable packages.

You see, while the rest of the entertainment world has fully embraced cheap and easy streaming, it doesn’t quite work that way with sports. The major North American sports leagues understand that there’s a high demand for watching games live and have priced it accordingly.

That doesn’t mean there are no gameday options for cord-cutters, though. When NFL Sunday rolls around and your team is competing for glory, you can still catch the games without cable. You just need to understand the ins and outs of the various networks that air NFL games and what your options are for accessing them over the internet.

That’s why we’re here. Whether you root for a championship contender, a hopeful underdog, or the Miami Dolphins, there are still ways to watch without getting gutted by a cable bill.

Your personal situation matters

It’s an unfortunate reality that the NFL is still bound by old broadcast rules regarding which games can be watched in which broadcast markets. You can see every game on Sundays no matter where you live in the U.S., but how cheap and straightforward that will be can vary greatly depending on your location.

First and foremost, do you live in the broadcast market for your preferred team? In other words, is your team always on your local Fox or CBS affiliate on Sundays? If so, watching NFL games legally without cable is going to be cheaper and easier for you for reasons we’ll get into shortly. Pat yourself on the back for that one.

Since the majority of NFL games are on over-the-air networks like Fox, CBS, and NBC, physical proximity to the team you care about is a huge bonus. If you don’t have that, there are still options, but they’re not the best for your bank account.

Embrace the streaming future

If you want to jump headfirst into the future and legally stream all the NFL action this year, it’s probably not going to be cheap. But if you live in your team’s broadcast area, you can make things simpler with one of the many streaming cable alternatives on the market today. 

Services like Sling, YouTube TV, Hulu with Live TV, PlayStation Vue, and fuboTV can essentially replicate the cable experience using an internet connection. The prices vary quite a bit, with Sling’s best value package coming in at just $25 per month while fuboTV starts at $55 per month. 

This can be annoying, as not every service gets every channel. If you want to catch everything through one service, you need Fox, CBS, NBC, ESPN and NFL Network. Sling doesn’t appear to support CBS, while Hulu and YouTube TV don’t have NFL Network, where most Thursday night games air.

Image: Ian Johnson/Icon Sportswire

However, you can work around a lack of CBS and NFL Network. CBS All Access is only $6 per month, while most of this year’s Thursday night games will be free to watch with an Amazon Prime subscription. As a fun bonus, unlike Fox and CBS, you can stream Sunday night games on NBC for free. 

The best value here is probably Sling’s $25 per month option with an additional CBS All Access subscription so you can catch games on CBS. That would come out to about $31 per month, which isn’t bad. Again, this is only helpful if your team is on your local TV networks each week. If not, get ready to spend some money.

Give the NFL a ton of money for every game

Of course, the NFL itself is happy to sell you access to games, but it will cost you. 

There are two main options for legally watching games directly from the NFL. Game Pass is the more affordable one at just $99, but it’s also limited in a pretty key way. You can watch full replays of every game after they air, but only after they air. That means Game Pass doesn’t let you see games live, which is kind of an important part of sports fandom. 

If you want to see games how they were intended to be seen, NFL Sunday Ticket lets you watch every out-of-market game live from a dedicated streaming app for a little less than $300, or $73.49 per month. It’s offered through DirecTV, but you can get it without DirecTV as long as the link above declares you eligible. 

Yes, $300 for one season of football is a big buy, and the fact that it won’t let you watch local market games is a problem if you live in your team’s broadcast area. But if you moved away from home and want to keep following your team (and any others that interest you), Sunday Ticket works just fine. 

Go old-school

If you live near your preferred team, the cheapest and probably best option is also the least modern. You should just get a TV antenna.

As long as you can get a decent signal from whichever room your TV happens to be in, you can get an antenna for less than $50. These are pretty simple to install and will grant you access to your local Fox, CBS, and NBC affiliates for all the Sunday action you could need.

The big disadvantage to this approach is you won’t get games on ESPN or NFL Network, but if you can live without those, you’ll save a ton of money by just taking an old-school approach. 

Unfortunately, there isn’t a perfect solution to this problem. If you can afford cable, that’s still probably the best way to watch the NFL for the time being. Luckily, some of the aforementioned solutions should at least be able to meet you halfway.