Gotta be the shoes

Well, we have a new tradition in our house when it comes to the San Francisco 49ers and given the Niners are playing for the No. 1 seed in the NFC when they host Seattle Saturday night, it must be the shoes.

My wife ordered a pair of Betsey Johnson, rhinestone-covered, football-themed shoes, with little footballs made out of the inexpensive, man-made gems.

They are red and gold, but they are not 49ers shoes, per se. It just so happens they have 49ers colors and she now wears them for every 49ers game. When she saw them online, she determined there and then that these were to be her “lucky shoes” for 49ers games.

Seems to be working. After Sunday night’s heart-stopping, 42-38 win over the Chicago Bears that wasn’t decided until the final play, the 49ers are riding a six-game winning streak.

My wife insists it’s the shoes.

But the 49ers have four losses on the season. How can the shoes be lucky?

She has an answer for that. She didn’t get them until the second or third week of the season. Additionally, during a couple of those losses, she didn’t put them on until after the game had started. Every superstitious sports fan knows you have to have on your lucky garb before the game begins.

With that caveat, she makes sure to have them on before kickoff. Last week, when San Francisco beat the Colts on Monday Night Football, she wore the shoes to work. Must cover all bases when shoes are anointed “lucky.”

I’d been planning on writing this column for a couple weeks, but after Sunday’s finish, I figured I’d better do it now because it will look silly to talk about lucky shoes coming off a loss.

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It’s bad enough that I have to pay for streaming services to watch some games and other sporting events. But if there is one thing I have noticed, on both Amazon Prime and Netflix: those companies still don’t have the bandwidth to handle the large amounts of traffic to watch these games.

To be honest, I rarely have watched sports on streaming platforms, usually because games on Prime or Netflix tend to occur on nights that I am working. But I’ve been off a lot the last couple of weeks, due to illness and the holidays, so I’ve had more time to watch these events on these streaming platforms.

One thing I found out real quick: get in early and stay. if you wait until the start of the game or event, you may get iced out and get the spinning wheel of death on your television screen.

But even if you do connect quickly, the chances of the stream being in high definition and not glitchy is slim. I admit I watched the farce that Jake Paul has made of boxing, so like a lot of other people, I took delight in seeing Anthony Joshua nearly take his head off. But the Netflix stream of that fight was so glitchy, it was at times hard to even watch.

Same could be said of the Netflix NFL games Christmas Day. It seems once you’ve been on the platform for a while, it tends to clean up, but the terrible picture quality early makes it hard to enjoy the game later, wondering if the feed would glitch out during an important play.

Secondly, and this is my biggest pet peeve: you can’t channel surf on Netflix or Amazon. So when games go to commercial, you’re stuck either watching ads for products you don’t want, or, you exit out, go to your live TV source and then have to remember to log in again.

Bottom line, if pro sports are going to put more and more events on streaming platforms, those platforms need to step up their game.

Nathan Mollat has been covering high school sports in San Mateo County for the San Mateo Daily Journal since 2001. He can be reached by email: nathan@smdailyjournal.com.