Why Did You Miss the First Quarter of Sunday’s Bears Game? [VIDEO]

Bears fans across the Stateline area likely were pulling their hair out around 3:30 p.m. on Sunday. Instead of seeing the Monsters of the Midway kick off in Atlanta, Rockford area viewers were treated to "Bonus Coverage" of the Carolina/Cincinnati overtime game.

What happened? Well, the short story is the NFL's TV broadcasting agreement with Fox stipulates that any station outside of a team's main market (in this case, Chicago) is not able to switch to the late/3:25 p.m. game as long as a ealy/noon game still is in play. That means, unfortunately, Bears fans were stuck with the last minutes of an overtime ties instead of seeing Robbie Gould's first field goal of the game. Contractually, there was no way to change the feed we were receiving.

In a statement on the station's website, the General Manager of FOX 39, Kelly Lattimer, stressed there was nothing they could do about situation:

"We were scheduled to show the Bears game in its entirety.  It was not our decision to show the Cincinnati/Carolina game.  The decision to show bonus coverage of the Cincinnati/Carolina game was based on the FOX Network agreement with the NFL, and we had no control over this decision."

I talked about all of this earlier today morning with Matt and Candice on WTVO's Morning Show: