Eight ways from Sunday

So here’s the deal.

You can watch NFL games every Sunday afternoon on CBS and Fox, every Sunday night on NBC. That’s kind of the old-fashioned way, accepting what the networks give you, but it doesn’t cost anything extra.

For the estimated 98 million people in the country who get ESPN as part of basic cable, they also get “Monday Night Football.”

Plus, at this time of year you also get Saturday football on the networks plus all the pregame and postgame shows full of analysis and NFL chatter.

There has been much more throughout the season: There’s the NFL Network, which has had games on Thursdays the second half of the season. Not everybody’s cable system carries the NFL Network, but if yours does or you have satellite television (Dish Network, DirecTV), you get the games, you get more analysis shows and even special packages like last Saturday’s 17 hours of Cowboys retrospective leading up to the Dallas-Baltimore game.

You can even, if you have a Sprint phone with a database plan, watch or listen to the NFL Network games on your mobile phone, though what fun is that when you can do something much better?

The ultimate experience has been available for the most fervent NFL fan: the NFL Sunday Ticket on DirecTV. That would be those of you who have been playing in a fantasy league, who want to watch the Game Mix channel where you can watch eight games at the same time and track, well, everything.

That is for those who want to go to one channel and check off the names of your fantasy players, and who can also jump to another channel called the Red Zone where a frantically under-control host named Andrew Siciliano verbally scrambles from Green Bay to Atlanta to Denver to San Francisco, performing word gymnastics, as the Packers are about to score, then shifting to the 15 as New Orleans is about to score, all the while updating you on the weather, the score, who’s about to score and when and why and, just . . . wow.

You are Wayne Runyon, a labor relations attorney for 20th Century Fox who works in Sherman Oaks, lives in Laguna Hills and, along with 14-year-old son Tyler, 13-year-old son Jacob, 10-year-old daughter Delaney and wife Sharon, happily participate in all the interactive features that Sunday Ticket offers.

“The real reason I got DirecTV,” Runyon said, “was I got tired of watching crummy football on Sundays. We’re fans of the Chargers, but every weekend the Chargers, the Raiders? Now I can watch virtually any game, I can see the progress of every game going on at a time. I’m a fantasy football guy. My sons are fantasy football guys and now we can watch eight games at once, scroll through them all, highlight one of the eight, get the audio.

“I’m not embarrassed to say, this maximizes my experience.”

The Red Zone

“You’re in my ear.”

“Roll green, stand by yellow. Roll yellow, stand by max, stand by green.”

“Weather is eighty-sixed in Green Bay; those guys just didn’t look cold. It doesn’t show the weather, it just shows knuckleheads.”

That’s the talk Siciliano hears in his ear seconds before 10 a.m. on a Sunday morning.

To produce Runyon’s maximum experience takes energy, and it is the hyperactive Siciliano who orchestrates the cacophony that is chattered into his earpiece for six or seven hours into nuanced commentary on all the games. At once.

Eric Shanks, DirecTV’s executive vice president for entertainment, said he got the idea for what he calls “football, perfected, all the best bits live and commercial-free, the perfect football afternoon,” when he lived in Italy and saw Sky Sport Italia doing a soccer day of commercial-free live looks and highlights of all the games going on.

“It was brilliant, and fast forward to when we were doing negotiations between the NFL and DirecTV, how could you go wrong by looking in live at every game all the time?” Shanks said. “Think about what sports radio is. They throw a guy in every press box and call in updates. But we have the rights to score the video.”

Runyon is a San Diego Chargers fan but isn’t particularly interested in watching a single game of stops and starts and unproductive drives and commercials and halftime and players who might not be on his fantasy roster or be particularly good. “Why would I want to watch the Raiders at all?” he said.

“I want to watch eight games. I want to go to Carolina because I want to see what Steve Smith is doing; I have a lot of different players I have an interest in and I want to see all of them and we have that technology to do that.”

Shanks said that in a 3 1/2 -hour NFL game, “there’s 23 minutes of football from snap to whistle and we don’t show you any of the down time.

“The only way my 10-year-old will sit and watch football is the Red Zone.”

Runyon said his teenage sons also prefer to watch the NFL in highlight chunks, eight games at a time, fantasy team players highlighted. “What this gives my kids is an awareness of a lot of different players and a lot of different teams,” he said. “They can talk intelligently about a multitude of NFL players.”

So that’s how Runyon’s sons get their NFL knowledge, from watching dozens of individual television productions culled into eight squares on the television set.

Are Tyler and Jacob in Laguna Hills being raised as highlight junkies? Will they ever be inclined to buy a ticket, go to a stadium and sit through a 3 1/2 -hour game to enjoy not only the highlights but the punts?

“I think so,” Runyon said. “But if they have the choice, they’d probably rather go to a Lakers game and watch Sunday Ticket at home.”

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diane.pucin@latimes.com