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The NFL Is Back, And So Is The Biggest Time Suck On TV
It’s not a sport, it’s a clock-chewing ad machine.
A few years ago I tried to calculate the huge amount of time that’s wasted watching the NFL, mostly as a way of trying to get myself to stop watching so much.
Your typical week during the regular season has five gaming periods. Sunday afternoons, Sunday evenings, Sunday night, Monday night, and Thursday night. Each game lasts about three hours. That’s 15 hours of football just watching the games.
Then you’ve got all the pre-game discussion and post-game “analysis” on channels like ESPN and others.
What exactly is there to analyse about a football game, anyway? The other team scored more points so they wound up winning. OMG, really?
You’ve got all the prep that goes into watching a game. Barbecuing and cookouts. Inviting friends and family over. Boozing and whatnot. If you’re attending a game in person, it becomes practically a whole day between tailgating, the event itself, and fighting traffic afterward.
Then you’ve got all the extracurricular stuff. Fantasy football, which apparently involves a lot of agonizing over assembling a make-believe team of players or something. Online betting. Console gaming. Memorabilia collecting.
