are you ready for some, er, hmm

11 minutes of

A whole lot of nothing wrapped around a little bit of something. I think this explains why I find football rather boring. Quite literally, 80-90% of the game's time is expended doing absolutely NOTHING. It is true that a good portion of a baseball game seems like absolutely nothing is happening but an overcomplicated game of catch, but there's at least a lot more game going on for someone to watch, as each pitch tends to come within an allotted time of each other (so long as nobody is on base). By the more extreme contrast, it's pretty hard to find a moment that nothing at all is happening in a basketball game, a hockey game, or a soccer match. Timeouts and quarter/halftime breaks obviously are an issue, but then, football has these too, in addition to a goddamn commercial almost every time the ball changes possession. So basically, you could watch some NFL hour long highlight show every weekend and get 4 or 5 games in, complete start to finish. Another solution would be to DVR every play of a game one wanted to watch and, in addition to the hour of commercials, you could skip every play clock reset. There are two ways to approach that: 1) the ability to remain plopped on a couch awaiting the dramatic end of a game would pretty much cease. 2) You could watch every week's worth of NFL games in the time it takes to watch one.

The other reason this seems tremendously difficult to hold my attention is the easy ability to make war analogies (the quarterback, otherwise known as the field general,...in spite of the blitz, even if he has to use the shotgun...) and then the actual ability of the game to attempt to replicate the pacing of a war; a few brief seconds of furious activity, followed by a period of calm as each side plans its next moves, combined with a relative rate of attrition as players are carted off the field for injuries. Basically, if I wanted to watch a war, I'd go find one that we've started in the past 20 years. I do think there must be some social value to being able to ignore most of the action on screen, such as maybe, I don't know, talking to other people in between plays during the ample time given to do so. I'm not sure this is what all football fans use it for, but it seems like a decent enough plan (baseball's "pastoral" atmosphere relies on this as well I imagine). Except I think I'd rather talk more continuously and conversationally, and use my recreation for things that allow me to focus my attention more completely.