This weekend, watching the New England Patriots game, I had an awful realization – namely, that I’m kind of sick of the whole NFL circus. The amount of time you have to invest in front of your TV for any one game has really started to exasperate me. By my thumbnail reckoning, the actual time spent playing is just over 20 minutes – and that’s for a game that typically lasts, these days, three and a half hours. So reckon THREE HOURS of garbage you have to endure just to find out who wins. And am I wrong, or is this garbage more putrid than in years past? Maybe I’m just having an adverse reaction to Joe Theismann.
And is anyone else bothered by the terribly legalistic direction NFL football has taken in recent years? I can’t think of any other sport where the rules are so byzantine, so numerous, and take center stage to such a degree. Worse, the fans don’t actually understand many of them. I doubt most reasonably experienced fans would be able to say, for instance, what constitutes an illegal formation, why a receiver downfield might be ineligible, or when intentional grounding should be called.
What’s funny is that Saturday night I was watching the *other *type of football (soccer, on this side of the pond), and it was terrific – everything that NFL football isn’t. The rules can be expressed pretty simply (don’t touch the ball with your hands, play the ball not the man, stay onsides), and when the match is advertised as being 90 minutes, that’s what you get – 90 minutes of play. Stoppages are usually brief and inconsequential, so you get no commercials except at the half. And the game commentary, at least here in New England, was terrific – low-key, pertinent, addressed mostly to what was happening on the field.
Plus, of course, since no one else on the planet is watching MLS soccer on TV, the whole circus atmosphere around the NFL and the Sunday games is completely absent. It’s a purer and more elemental sporting experience, and I’m beginning to think that’s all I have patience for these days.