There are loads of "alternative" (pirate) streaming sites that let you watch a game live. You'd better have at least basic notions of web security if you're going to go poking around those places, even just to follow links and watch streaming video, but I got by in 2011-2017 with pirate streams before signing up for NFL Game Pass in 2018, as soon as I had the money to do so. The quality of the video on the pirate streams ranged from "I can't believe this is free" all the way down to the link itself not working, with many levels of quality between those extremes, but usually was in the range "well, it's good enough to follow the game, and it's free, which fits my budget perfectly." I don't miss that way of watching NFL games, but I was sure glad to have it.
I'm happy to pay $80-$100 per year for NFL Game Pass to get live or recorded access to every game from the preseason through the Super Bowl (and I guess the Pro Bowl too
), plus RedZone and NFL Network. The video quality is reliably great, and I never have to waste time looking for a stream, nor scrambling to find another if the one I'm watching gets cut, because that just doesn't happen on Game Pass.
However, in 2012-2017 I was living on a grad-student stipend that would have let me live like a king anywhere in the country except the greater São Paulo area, where I was living, and the greater Rio area, but it wasn't quite enough for those two regions, so I was forced to live in a cell (a "suite") and even so, to watch my money carefully so I wouldn't go hungry at the end of a pay period. However, keeping up with the NFL had become more important to me as a way to stay closer to my mom, so I found ways to do it free.
I followed the magical 2013 season on pirate streams, all the way through XLVIII. Each week, my mom would look at the TV schedule to see what games she'd have available to her in each time slot, and we'd choose one or two games from that week that we'd both watch and discuss in some combination of live discussion and after-the-fact discussion. My mom had chosen the Seahawks as one of her two teams to follow more closely that season, so the only times our games in a given week that season
didn't include the Seahawks game that week was when my mom's cable TV didn't give her a way to watch the Seahawks game that week, which happened three times or so because she lived in Maine. The video quality on the pirate streams were not as good as I get now from Game Pass, and sometimes a stream would just die in the middle of a game, forcing me to scramble to find another one. But it was free and it was good enough.
Of course, even to use pirate streaming sites, you'll have to pay for an internet connection and an internet-enabled device, and those weren't things you had to do in decades past, so maybe there's just no solution to those damn kids on your lawn.
