Anyone care to explain to a non-sports fan how you found the Bears-Packers (or any other televised game) entertaining to watch?

The Game Room
41

Spoilering, because it’s increasingly a hijack:

It’s not just two data points. Again: cable TV is just fine, streaming literally any other video content (Netflix, Disney+, Paramount+, Amazon Prime movies and TV shows, YouTube videos, etc.) is just fine. It’s only Prime live NFL games that is an issue.

42

The title of the thread is too vague to answer. If you actually want an honest answer you would elaborate on the question rather than ranting about your dislike.

I spent a number of years where I had no interest in sports, including football. Despite growing up as a football fan. I just lost interest. I’m totally sympathetic to your views and have no problem with them because I understand them.

But this doesn’t look like a real search for an answer. If this is, then would you care to elaborate what you don’t understand?

You don’t understand why people are defensive when your thread boils down to asking people to defend something they like which you don’t? I can’t help you there.

43

Sorry, I meant the original question, not your follow up.

44

Impressive. It has never seemed to me that sports fans required a specifically crafted proposition before willing to enter into discussion! :smiley:

45

That should be 2010.

46

Here is a 22 minute YT video from Legal Eagle on how gambling is bad for sports. TLDW: It’s bad news, especially proposition bets which can easily lead to corruption.

47

I’ll attempt to address @Dinsdale 's original question, as far as why I enjoyed watching and following pro football. (I’ve had similar discussions over the years with friends, who simply aren’t into sports at all, and wanted to understand the attraction.)

Part of it was, undoubtedly, growing up in an environment in which the Packers, and football, were a fundamental part of the fabric of the community and the culture. Green Bay is, by far, the smallest city/metro area which currently hosts a team in a major North American professional sports league; between the pride that locals have in that distinction, the team’s history, and the fact that the area isn’t terribly noteworthy for much else, the Packers are pretty much always newsworthy there.

My father had grown up in Green Bay, and he, too, was (still is) a lifelong Packers fan; he passed that down to me, by taking me to games, watching games on TV together, buying Packer-themed gifts for me, etc.

As far as what I enjoyed about the game itself, I can isolate a couple of specific elements:

  • There’s definitely a sense of tribal “belonging,” being part of a fandom to which most of your family, your friends, and your neighbors also belong. It also gives you an easy topic for conversation with fellow fans.
  • Football is a complicated game (even moreso today than it was when I was growing up), and there was a certain enjoyment in learning about the game, and building my understanding of it. That greater understanding also made it more enjoyable to watch games, because I increasingly had a grasp of what was going on on the field, what sorts of choices the coaches were making, etc. (When I first started playing Dungeons & Dragons, there was a similarly satisfying sense of building “rules mastery” by reading and playing and learning the rules.)
  • The game itself features a mix of athletic excellence and strategy, and the action during play can be very exciting. Granted, one of the “downsides” of the game is the stop-and-start nature of the action, and in talking to foreign-born friends who grew up on soccer and rugby, that can be a turn-off for many. (For what it’s worth, NFL games have gotten longer over the decades, mostly due to increased commercial time, but also due to instant-replay reviews of plays – and, of course, that extra length is entirely non-action.)
  • There’s also an element of, I guess, pageantry, which is part of the game: the pregame National Anthem, the coin flip, the player introductions, the touchdown celebrations, etc. All of that can, for a fan, add to the excitement of the experience.
  • I became a fan of certain players, as well as my team. At any given time during my Packers fandom, there’d be one or two players on the team for whom I had a particular affinity, and whom I particularly enjoyed watching. I’ve owned a number of Packers replica jerseys over the years, and most of them are #82, in honor of a guy named Paul Coffman, who was the Packers’ tight end in the late '70s and '80s, and who was my favorite player in that era.
  • In addition to enjoying watching football, I was able to extend that enjoyment into another one of my lifelong hobbies: gaming. I had an Electric Football game as a kid (a gift from my father, of course), I played “tabletop” football strategy games (APBA and Strat-o-Matic) for many years, I played a ton of the Madden video game for a while, and I participated in fantasy football, on and off, for years.
  • Finally, because football and Packer games are part of my childhood, there’d always been a certain nostalgia aspect of it for me. When I’d go to Lambeau to watch a game in-person, I’d remember the games I went to as a kid. When I’d watch the Packers on TV, I’d remember past games that I’d enjoyed.
48

I answered that the game was exiting because it was an incredible come back with an improbable ending. You countered with asking if I enjoyed the commercials because you found the beginning boring. Seems like you would only be satisfied with football fans saying football sucks. Ok, football sucks. Don’t watch.

49

For me, part of the enjoyment is that I grew up watching football, and found it entertaining even back then. I also actually like the downtime in between plays, which IMHO makes the sport more strategic than sports like basketball or soccer where the action is constant. It’s like the difference between a turn based RPG compared to an action game.

50

Part of why I enjoy a football broadcast that others might find boring is that some of the downtime isn’t really downtime - there are strategic things happening with substitutions and other decisions that are interesting, even though the ball isn’t in play.

Regarding the streaming quality question - do you watch any other live events over streaming? It’s actually more difficult technically to stream a live event than prerecorded content. When you’re watching normal content, often the system pre-loads some buffer ahead of the point you’re watching. That way, if there’s any hiccup with the connection, the video can continue to play the buffer while the connection works itself out.

With live streaming, there isn’t any future buffer to load, since you’re watching live. This means any connection issues are more likely to cause a visible problem, and it’s more common to get poor quality at times, if the connection encounters even a bit of slowness.

51

That doesn’t mean nothing was going on. Defense was going on.

Some people get bored watching a baseball game that doesn’t have a lot of home runs. Other (dare I say more sophisticated?) fans enjoy the nuances of a pitchers’ duel.

52

Yes, you may. And I agree!

53

I’m very sorry for your loss.

54

Are you suffering some sort of memory disorder that prevents you from just thinking back to when you were a football fan to answer your own question?

55

Pretty much this.

I almost never watch at home but I like seeing the games in a bar. When ads run I go pee or talk to friends.

And when something crazy happens like the last two Packers vs Bears games it is SO much fun being with others!

Not to mention I’ve met a few women this way so bonus.

56

My assumption is that the sport was different enough back then that it didn’t have at least some of the traits that Dinsdale has complained about in the OP.

57

The OP’s main complaint seems to be the amount of “dead time”—was there less of that decades ago?

58

Not in the game itself. In fact, there’s actually less now than there used to be. In the past, if the ballcarrier went out of bounds, the clock stopped until the next snap. Now, if the ballcarrier goes out of bounds, the clock starts as soon as the ball is returned to the field.

Although, there are probably more passing plays than decades ago. And an incomplete pass results in the stoppage of the clock.

And, of course, there are far more commercials, and longer commercial breaks during change of possessions.

59

Other than what @borschevsky points out (live streams rely much more on a good connection than buffered ones), the other possibility is that you on a shared connection (like cable internet) and the overall usage is much higher during NFL games that are “stream only”. And thus your bandwidth is being throttled. You could try to do an internet speed test during those times and see if that’s the case.

But it’s also possible that you have a “good” (high speed) connection but with intermittent dropouts that are requiring the live stream to switch to a lower quality to “catch back up” to the point in time that is being broadcast.

60

Best I could find in terms of game time is that games 2000 and beyond have all been about 3:05 plus or minus five minutes. So game time in the last 25 years has not changed. I can’t find any definitive stats from before then. I did see one mention that a 1970s game was about two and a half hours. I grew up in the 80s, and I seem to remember always accounting for about three hours of game time. If we got to grandpa’s house for the Bear’s game at noon, we could expect to start wrapping up at three to go home. We may have been figuring in a little bit of extra time, but three hours was the rule in my head. Also, three hours is a nice comfortable time for a sporting event for me. I like my baseball games around that length, as well.