Did you catch the game that the NFL televised almost completely using the SkyCam? Companies like the NFL do these kinds of things from time to time in the name of progress. They experiment with their product, in essence, change the recipe, hoping that a handful of people who wouldn’t normally be interested might buy or watch. When the NFL decides to change the way it televises games, when Coke decides to change the ingredients in its cola, what they’re really saying is “getting new customers is more important than satisfying my existing customers.” That’s a miscalculation.

The NFL did this on a show that used to be called Thursday Night Football. Now it’s just called the Worst Football of the Week because the matchups are typically awful. That the NFL would sacrifice an entire game to an experiment is essentially an admission of the crap level of the NFL on Thursday. They had to be thinking, Bills vs. Jets, hell, what have we got to lose? Well, the biggest thing the NFL has to lose is credibility with its core fans.

In certain situations, the overhead perspective provided by the SkyCam can add to a game experience, but as an every-down view, it’s maddening. The reason why every NFL TV play starts with an establishing shot from the sideline or pressbox is that fans always want to know some very basic things before every snap, namely, what yard line is the ball on and how far to go for a first down? The overhead view can’t provide this information, putting the viewer in a sort of anxious dream state where you never really know whether the result of the play was good or bad. It would be like watching a baseball game filmed only with a camera in the dugout, that is, you may be able to decipher whether a pitch was high or low, but without the view from behind the pitcher, you’d never know if any pitch ever crossed the plate. So you’re never really sure where the ball is, and worse, as the play happens, the overhead angle takes away your ability to understand the space the ball carrier is in, so that beautiful anticipatory moment when your star player is going to break into the clear is lost because every player is just an ant on a map.

How can this distorted presentation possibly be good? It turns out it’s not supposed to be good for the average football fan, it’s supposed to be good for the guy with the joystick. The NFL says, “Younger generations of NFL fans have grown accustomed to watching football from this angle through their love of video games. This telecast will have a look and feel akin to that experience …”

The NFL selling out its core fans to entice video gamers is analogous to the nation’s truck manufacturers selling out its construction-working base to sell trucks to teenage girls. Screw big, strong trucks, what we need is pink cupholders and vanity lights and a special place to put my purse. The NFL has lost its mind.

Here’s how this really works. The vast majority of fans in every sport are generational – they watch and attend events because their parents and grandparents did, because they were exposed to that sport at an early age. They will, in turn, pass down the love of that game to their kids. The young people who grew up riding motorcycles or playing soccer or riding in the rodeo can’t be converted to avid football fans. And the generation that grew up never leaving the house and who camped outside Wal-Mart for twenty-nine days to get the new AtariStation VIII isn’t gonna start watching football because it’s filmed from an overhead camera or a blimp or from a circling satellite. The NFL’s “experiment” is a silly, wasted one.

It’s bad business to alienate loyal customers. Even if by some divine intervention the Thursday Night Skycam captivated thousands of the Grand Theft Auto crowd, so what? Why would the NFL want to trade in its power users for a bucketful of occasional millennials; why would the NFL take their paying customers for granted to get a few “likes” from dudes playing Call of Duty? Sounds like the old NFL owners are getting bad advice from some hipster consultant.

Imagine you have Packer season tickets. In fact, the tickets have been passed down for generations. You run a small business, take groups of employees to away games, support Packers charities, have every Packers cap and tailgating gizmo every made. On Thanksgiving, you just want to sit back and relax and watch your Packers, but when you turn on the TV, all you see is the top of Aaron Rodgers’ head. What gives? Well, you know your fourteen-year-old nephew? The one who won’t go to school and plays Doom fulltime? The NFL put him in charge of this Thanksgiving Day telecast. He really likes the crazy camera angles, and even though he’ll probably never have a driver’s license or a steady job, the NFL cares more about him than you.

The NFL should spend less time trying to be hip and more time catering to the people who watch every game, the ones that buy the season tickets and the luxury boxes and the NFL logo t-shirts all the millennial gamers sleep in.