It's all very well and good being Scott the Food Critic and having a fancy list of hip and happening Dallas restaurants to go and watch football games. We don't all get paid to sit in bars and drink craft beers. The rest of us everyday working stiffs have things like taxes and utilities to think about.
Thus we arrive at the very nub of the question -- where can I watch sports that makes sense to do so, and how good will my experience be when I watch the aforementioned sports? That title was too unwieldy, though, so we went with something else. Here's a list of places it makes sense to watch the new football season, and where they are.
Humperdink's You might look down on Humperdink's as some sort of large sports bar where the food is terrible and the beer is average. And it may be all of those things. I'm asking you to move beyond your hoity-toity prejudices, and see it for what it is, which is a place where the food is cheap and unlikely to kill you, the screens are outlandishly big, and the beer is brewed in-house so is cheap. Humperdink's blonde beer is perfectly serviceable. And every Sunday it's $3 a pint at the Northwest Highway location, which also happens to have the biggest screen and be the tallest bar in Dallas. So there.
Buffalo Wild Wings Their menu claims the wings are "hand-spun." I have no idea what that means, but you're not there for wings. You're there for football. Sit at the bar, get a cheap beer, remark about the attentive service from the person who's paid to work behind the bar, not the half food-manager-cook-brewer in all the kind of one-person posh bars Scott loves. The beer selection isn't appalling, and you can't possibly overspend.
Quaker Steak & Lube If you can ignore the television in the floor as you go in and you like a table tap or three, this place has more televisions than you can possibly imagine, as well as cars suspended from the ceiling. As you get more and more drunk, you will begin to wonder how these cars are suspended. It's basically magic. Buckets of beer (I'm not entirely sure how much beer constitutes a bucket, sorry) are $12, and opening day of the season is Grandparent's day at the Plano location, for some reason, which means that if you can prove beyond reasonable doubt you have sired two generations of crotchfruit, you will get 10 percent off.
Yes, a lot has been written about Redneck Heaven. Sometimes, there is near nudity. We're not here for boobies though, dammit, we're here for handegg, and beer is super cheap here. They're basically giving you beer just to be around sports and boobies.
Literally every person in North Texas will be here. All of them. That means all of your friends and potentially some of your family, if you're from around here, but you won't get a seat. Anywhere. Not one seat. You'll have to sit with the joggers. But still: Great beer, passable food, lots of TVs, and lots of feral cats to throw at them.
