Here's the story about Sunday night's mysterious disappearance of "CSI: Miami."

Football ran more than an hour long, and the CBS contingency plan in case that happened was to pre-empt "CSI: Miami" and go straight to local news. (A repeat aired in the Pacific time zone.) Unfortunately, the end of "Undercover Boss" urged viewers to stay tuned for a new "CSI: Miami." And KMOV news didn't acknowledge the pre-emption on air, as far as I could tell, although the station put up notes on Twitter and Facebook. So many "CSI: Miami" fans were understandably confused and angry.

That was sloppy. But the truth is, you didn't miss anything. The pre-empted episode will be rescheduled. KMOV posted this on Facebook (www.facebook.com/news4stlouis) this morning after multiple complaints:

Note we received from CBS. "Last night's episode was preempted due to long running NFL. We provided a repeat episode for Mountain and West Coast stations, so the original planned to air last night will go back into the mix for this season's original episodes."

None of this solves the problem of football overruns on CBS, though. A football game these days rarely wraps up in 3 hours. Overruns every week mess up the start times of the shows that follow, and as an "Amazing Race" fan, I'm forced to record not just "Undercover Boss" (which I also like and watch) but "CSI: Miami" and sometimes even KMOV news just to make sure I get complete episodes of "Race" and "Boss."

The NFL is more popular than just about everything else on television. But CBS is not only annoying fans of the shows that follow, it's hurting those shows -- the 9 p.m. Sunday time period on CBS has become known as a death slot. And if the expectation is that NFL viewers will stay tuned for "60 Minutes," etc., that's possible. But it's also possible that as soon as the CBS game ends, football fans switch immediately over to the game on NBC.