Moderately Confused by Jeff Stahler for October 06, 2021

Ain’t that the truth!

Yes, but the other fifty-eight minutes are dead boring.

Where I’m from, two minutes of football takes two minutes.

It takes a lot of beer to support an NFL broadcast!

But not one single PSA about health or safety. Pure examples that dollars come before lives.

Team A scores touchdown – cut to commercial.

Team A kicks point after – cut to commercial.

Team A kicks off and it’s a touchback – cut to commercial.

Team B attempts pass – the ruling on the field is a completed pass – play is challenged – cut to commercials.

Ten minutes and a split Supreme Court decision later, the ruling on the field stands.

Meanwhile the play is shown over and over again forwards and backwards at various speeds and including the shot taken from the blimp circling the field.

Team B scores a touchdown – play is called back due to a holding penalty – cut to commercial.

Team B has an injured player – after showing gruesome footage of the player’s leg being bent into a pretzel-like configuration – cut to commercial.

Return to scene at the field. While awaiting the medical crew to scrape the injured player off the field with a spatula, commentators bring up obscure statistics about how the home team usually scores an average of 3.6 points in the last two minutes of play in games on Thursday night under a full moon when the temperature is above freezing.

The injured player is removed from the field and referees meet for four minutes to figure out where to spot the ball and how much time is left on the clock. Head referee spends another three minutes explaining the infield fly rule or whatever other justification was used to make the call.

Team B lines up to kick a field goal – calls time out to stop the clock – cut to commercial.

Team B lines up to kick a field goal – Team A calls a time out to “ice” the kicker – cut to commercial.

Field goal is kicked – cut to commercial

Kickoff is a touchback – cut to commercial

Two minute – warning – cut to commercial.

Two minutes and thirty-two seconds of playing time has elapsed, meanwhile the smoke alarm has been going off for 30 minutes as dinner is burning in the oven.

And that is how the exciting game of American Football is played.

Shaq-a-Roni pizza..again.

As exciting as any game run by billionaires, played by millionaires, and funded by taxpayers. Go MY team!

Up here we have a three minute warning. But those three minutes go faster than the 2 minutes down there. Makes for a faster and more exciting game.

I’ve been trying to find, where online the NFL was putting condensed versions of games (after the fact).It was almost nicer than watching the game live). I hope they haven’t done away with it.

NFL Red Zone channel is a good way to watch NFL football on Sunday. They show nothing but action, all the scoring and no commercials. You just have to accept the constant switching from one game to another.

60 minutes of play with only 13 minutes of action somehow becomes three hours of TV. Ain’t nuthin’ longer than a football minute.

Fun fact. One of my good friends’ dad worked as a bigwig at ESPN back when they were starting out in the late 70s/early 80s, and flat out admitted that one of their internal mechanisms at the time was to push the notion of American sports being “superior” to other sports that are watched globally, since it was far easier to include advertising in sports that had constant time outs like American football, baseball, basketball, and ice hockey. This gave rise to the popular notion that soccer is “boring” despite the fact that the game is played without stoppages beyond half time.

It takes 3 hours and 15 minutes to complete a 60 minute game!

It’s worse in basketball. The last two minutes can last a half hour!

I seem to be risking deportation in my comments today. But—Football is such a dumb game. A few seconds of play at a time. Boring. More significantly, I resent the importance placed on it in school. Kids sustain injuries that they carry for their lifetimes because football is so all-important. Other sports cause injuries, too, but at least they’re not from almighty football! I will now don a helmet, nonetheless, to field the consequences of my blasphemy.

When my wife wants to know how much time is left in the game i order to plan dinner, I use the term “Football Minutes”Works pretty well

I discovered pro soccer, especially Premier League. Nearly continuous action.