This might be one of the saddest things we have seen a nightly network newscast do.

NBC stooped so low to having Nightly News Anchor Lester Holt do the show from outside Gillette Stadium in Foxboro, MA to promote the fact that the New England Patriots vs. Tampa Bay Buccaneers game is on NBC this weekend.

This is Tom Brady’s return to New England to face off against his old team and NBC News thought that it was worth doing the broadcast outside the stadium.

In reality, it’s an inter-conference matchup in the regular season that won’t matter a bit playoff time and yet NBC is playing it off like it’s the Super Bowl.

It appears the network is willing to sell out Nightly News and Anchor Lester Holt in what is nothing more than a promo for NBC Sports.

There was a time when networks sent the Anchor out into the field for major news events, such as a natural disaster, terror attack, explosion, etc. Now, NBC is shilling out Nightly News to help promote a regular-season football game that will air on its network.

Oh, how the mighty have fallen.

Lastly, Holt said during his promo newscast that tickets for the sold-out game a very hard to come by, and that the cheapest ticket on StubHub was going for $1000 or more.

This morning, FTVLive looked at Stubhub and found a number of tickets for less than $300.

I guess Holt just wanted to hype the game as any good pitchman would do. I guess the newsman in him has sold completely out.