Football games have never been so annoying.
Don't confuse the games with the sport - the NFL is one of America's most popular religions for a reason. And college football's entertainment value is still elite, with the soap opera it sustains every month as wild and accessible as ever.
The act of watching an entire football game has never felt more like a test of loyalty - it’s a chore with fleeting moments of intrigue. Even the best matchups of the season are full of bloat that impairs the experience.
Players and outcomes are not immune, either. Momentum suffers when players are forced to stand around waiting for an ad bloc to run, or an unnecessary officiating review to siphon football out of the football experience.
Is that a subtle reference to JK Dobbins’ touchdown, whistled dead and later downgraded to field goal after SEC officials chose to review the obvious Garrett Wilson catch that preceded it in during the 2019 CFP semifinal? I’ll never tell. I’m not still mad about it. I’m laughing. It’s funny. They took their sweet goddamn time. Obvious catch. Hilarious.
Only 15% of current Game broadcasts is actual football being played. And while that’s an annoyance today, it’s an existential crisis for the sport tomorrow.
But yes, I definitely enjoy the sport more than the games these days. The relentless orgy of commercial breaks and intrusive in-game ads are the biggest culprit. Inexhaustible greed is an inescapable part of the human condition, but this money-grab has gotten especially gross on Fall Saturdays.
Even the creation of football’s greatest unifier - the targeting penalty, which absolutely nobody likes - has been reappropriated for expanding shareholder wealth. It was packaged as a tool to make the sport safer, but only created a wider berth to cut away for more commercial breaks and disrupt games.
Obvious, malicious targeting - fine, call those. But the ones that require Zapruder-like enhancement, 10 minutes of deliberation and a coin flip? Yeah Chevrolet and Budweiser love those. Just another weapon to transform a football game into a ref show nobody but advertisers wants to see.
But football is still the sport of kings, and we're still addicted to it. Even when it’s annoying.
If this current version of the college football game experience was your first exposure to the sport - a four-hour investment serving as a vehicle for ads targeting the caricature of the dopiest middle-aged man in America, sprinkled between refs conspiring to harm your team - it would be hard to get as romantic about it as we are. To be clear, we = you, the person reading a football column in June and me, the dopey caricature of a middle-aged man writing it.
It’s not supposed to be this way, and for the longest time it wasn’t. We've been stuck in this unfortunate iteration of the American football experience for quite awhile, and it felt like nothing could be done to fix it.
But then the 2023 Major League Baseball season started. And this happened:
It’s just Theo Epstein, the man who ended the two most notorious championship droughts in American sports history that don’t belong to Cleveland calling baseball an unwatchable sport. If only football’s stewards had the same appetite for self-assessment.
Baseball games played out like this for decades: dead time, advertising bloc, a brief flirtation with actual baseball, more dead time and then more ads. It was destined to become a niche product due to the time required and the tedious cadence of every game. Life hasn’t moved as slowly as baseball does for decades.
Over the course of one offseason MLB reinvented its entire consumer value proposition. The age of its average consumer is likely to come down several integers as a result, because its stewards aligned on the current condition of their product (unwatchable!) and made appropriate moves toward a desired condition.
Inexhaustible greed is an inescapable part of the human condition, but this money-grab has gotten especially gross on Fall Saturdays.
And now an entire baseball game takes less time than a movie. MLB surgically removed dead time from its experience, and even baseball officiating is now required to operate with urgency when it performs reviews.
Compare that to football, where it takes refs two to five minutes longer than everyone in the stadium or watching on television to reach the same conclusion - like they’re using their own substandard performance review as an opportunity to take a coffee break.
They move with a Sunday driver’s sense of urgency. That process should operate like a pit crew.
That's the first and easiest fix that won't happen because of football's addiction to ad revenue - incentivizing replay urgency to keep games moving. Football’s stewards have not reached the point where they realize their product is getting progressively less enjoyable.
They’re too blinded by money to see the current, unsustainable trajectory of their asset.
Jim Harbaugh looks up at the replay screen during an extended break in the action at Kinnick Stadium back on Oct 1, 2022. © Bryon Houlgrave/The Register / USA TODAY NETWORK
This greed bloat is easy to quantify: BTN shaves down broadcasts to clean, 60-minute edits, which are actually 38-minute games with 22 minutes of commercials. That makes 15% of the original live broadcast actual football.
The other 85% of the experience includes some inter-play tension, but it is mostly dead time and commercials. And while that’s just annoying today, it’s an existential crisis for the sport tomorrow.
You’re supposed to believe college kids getting NIL money is what’s wrong with the sport today, sure. The game itself is fine because football is proof of God’s unconditional love. Humans without helmets or pads on are the ones ruining the experience. The kids, as always, in every generation, are alright.
Football is violent, dramatic and constructed so that any play can become the most important one of the game. Baseball is largely passive and operated for well north of a century without any clocks, which gave fan attention span some latitude. They could miss a few pitches or an entire third of an inning without much risk.
That all changed this year. Football games now have more pee breaks than baseball games.
Improving the experience should be an uncomplicated errand, but today maximizing revenue takes precedent over product quality. The best way to improve the football game experience in 2023 is to tune out the world and watch the games you want on your own time instead of in real time. Just fast-forward your way to efficiency.
That’s the only way to trim the bloat that’s been implanted into the experience. This is not a sustainable product. Maybe someday football will choose to learn what baseball finally figured out in 2023.
