- Pros
Good-looking design and usability. Video feeds. Fantasy league info. Commentary.
- Cons Commercials. Not enough written coverage. No player stats.
- Bottom Line
The NFL has embraced the new Windows, with this well-designed and enjoyable app that shows you scores, video highlights, and even full games.
With the NFL season in full swing, it's time to start paying attention to football, unless you have the misfortune of being a New York fan. The NFL on Windows 8 (free) modern app lets you do just that. The app's appearance is hardly a coincidence, given that Microsoft supplied NFL football league with Surface tablets. NFL on Windows 8 lets you not only watch sports news commentary, analysis, and game highlight from your favorite teams, but also work on your fantasy team and sign into your cable account to access RedZone and NFL Network to watch full games.
Get Going With NFL on Windows 8
You get the free app from the Windows Store. It's a reasonable 35MB download, and it runs on ARM as well as x86 and 64-bit Windows 8.x. There are two other official NFL apps for Windows 8.x as well: NFL Now, a standalone version of one of the main NFL app's sections, and NFL Fantasy Football, which the main app also covers. I'm not sure why one app didn't suffice.
The app is polished and well stocked with features football lovers will appreciate. The whole app makes good use of touch gestures. You can flick any of its panels in and out to taste. A swipeable left panel shows a menu offering NFL Now top stories, NFL Network coverage, RedZone, Game Rewind, Your Team, Fantasy, and Settings. Along the bottom are thumbnails of the vast video content you can watch. You can pause, replay, and scrub through the videos, and blow them up to full screen size.
As soon as I first ran NFL on my Surface Pro 3, the app started spewing video showing three bros going over the weekend's gridiron wars. The commentary was from leading analysts, with a lot of good inside info.
The Game Center is one of the app's more useful features. From it, you can see all the scores from the most recent weekend, along with league standings, and the League Feed showing the latest and hottest stories about players, coaches, and plays. For example, when I checked, the hot topics were about Green Bay Packers quarterback Aaron Rogers' 33-yard pass and whether Geno Smith was worried about being greeted with boos when he came onto the field.
Go Team, Go!
When you dig down into a team in the app, you can see its complete schedule and highlights. NFL on Windows 8 can send notifications for touchdowns and fantasy activity. One thing you won't get as much as with the ESPN Windows modern app is written coverage and commentary. This NFL official app beats that for video content, but after you've checked the scores, standings, and videos, there isn't much to read. The separate NFL Mobile app, as well as the ESPN app offer more literary football fodder.
One shortcoming is the app's lack of player stats. By comparison, the MLB official apps offer a wealth of stats in addition to video clips, as does the ESPN app, though that doesn't offer league-wide sortable stats. And a problem for cord-cutters is that a lot of NFL for Windows 8's features won't be available to them, such as Game Rewind and NFL Network/RedZone. But if you do have a cable login, you can watch live games in the app. Another drawback is that the video feed tends to show a lot of commercials, even when you just want to replay a video.
Since the NFL on Windows 8 app is a free download, I can't be too hard on it. It's well-designed and full of great content. As such, NFL on Windows a must for gridiron addicts, but you may want to supplement it with other sources such as ESPN's modern Windows app.
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