Disclosure: The folks at Sprint have sent me a pretty swanky new phone and free service for a pre-determined period of time. This doesn't automatically mean that I'll be praising Sprint left and right, but before I talk about this sort of thing, it's only right that everybody knows the genesis behind it.
The football writers of SBNation have decided that it just isn't enough for us to be connected to Yahoo! Sports, SI.com, USA Today, and numerous other places throughout this vast interweb of ours, so we've expanded outside of that realm and can now be found on Sprint's NFL Mobile Live service. If you're a Sprint customer, you may have already seen it. . .all you need to do is launch NFL Mobile Live and hit the "My Team" button. If you've set your team to Minnesota, you'll see a lot of the great stories at DN readily available on your screen. If you've set your team to somebody else. . .and why on earth would you. . .but you'll see SBNation stories from their team's blog as well.
The rest of the NFL Mobile Live app is pretty sweet, too. It has a scoreboard that automatically updates and allows you to drill all the way down to one game, it gives you the ability to watch highlights straight from NFL.com, and even the ability to watch the NFL Network live. The biggest one for me personally, however, is that it gives you the ability to listen to the audio broadcast for any NFL game. So on Monday night, for the first time in forever, I was able to turn on the Vikings' game, mute the ESPN volume, and listen to the dulcet tones of Paul Allen as the Vikings defeated Green Bay. Always nice to hear PA, especially for a game that Viking fans were as worked up for as that one.
Sprint is also giving everyone out there a chance to win tickets to Super Bowl XLIV every week of the NFL season by voting on the NFL's "Can't Miss Plays of the Week." The Brett Favre to Greg Lewis touchdown pass was named as Week 3's "Can't Miss Play" (obviously)., and I'm certain that the Vikings will be up there a few other times this year, too.Now, much like I said with the Comcast thing, don't think that we're selling out here at DN or anything. Without sponsorship or advertising and things of that nature, you probably wouldn't be here reading this, because The Daily Norseman more than likely wouldn't even exist. I, personally, don't make a heck of a lot of money off of this website, and there are a great number of benefits that the site gets for being a part of SBNation, such as the increased exposure. These sorts of sponsorships make the blog better, in my opinion, because it gets the stuff that Anthony, Eric, and I write to an even wider array of people, which can only lead to even bigger and better things for the site in the future.
So, with that said, thanks to everyone for supporting the site to this point in time. Even though sponsorship is nice, as I've mentioned, the real driving force behind this blog is all of you out there. Without you, there is definitely no site, and we appreciate the number of people that come here every single day for news and views about the Vikings and the NFL in general.