IN THE FALL of 2022, some friends and I took the PATH train from Manhattan out to MetLife Stadium in East Rutherford, New Jersey, to see the New York Jets host my beloved Buffalo Bills. The idea was that seeing it live would fill in some details that you can’t glean from watching the NFL on TV: the sheer speed of the game, the noise of the crowd, the full picture of the complex plays on the field as seen from above. Instead, it was hard to follow and sort of flat. The firehose of information I’m used to—updates from other games, stats flashing across the screen, each team’s tendencies and plays analyzed by announcers in real time—was missing. I couldn’t even approximate those on my phone, because the 80,000-plus other phones in the stadium were crowding the cell signal. I left deflated, and not just because the Bills took a hard loss in which their quarterback, Josh Allen, injured his throwing arm.
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