Football combines the two worst things about America: it is violence punctuated by committee meetings.
- George Will
It was a cold, lazy Sunday morning…and so I decided watch a football game. I don’t watch the NFL nearly as much as I used to, but I still enjoy a good game now and again. Not that Kansas City-St. Louis was that, but for some reason Portland’s Fox affiliate, KPTV, wasn’t showing any NFC games in the 10am time slot. Sure, the NY Giants-Philadelphia was on in other parts of the country, but KPTV apparently decided that showing infomercials and Kaleidoscope on Ice were better options. I digress, however, because my growing frustration had little to do with the game that was available at 10am than the seemingly interminable interruptions for commercials.
The Chiefs-Rams game really didn’t have much in the way of flow to it- too many punts, too little scoring- in the first half, and it began to seem as if CBS was breaking to commercial every five minutes or so. Punt, commercial. Interception, commercial. Field goal, commercial. Kick off, commercial. The more it happened, and the more I began to think about it, the more frustrating it became.
Don’t get me wrong; I understand the nature of free television and the need for networks to pay the bills. Such is the nature of capitalism and the nature of the business model TV networks operate under. Advertising rates are the altar at which network executives worship. I also get that the NFL is a very lucrative proposition for everyone involved in it- owners, players, advertisers, and yes, television networks. Having said that, though, I can’t help but wonder why no one at the NFL or network headquarters seem to neither notice nor care that the experience of watching a football game has become a very disjointed and increasingly less enjoyable experience. As the value of broadcasting contracts increase, programmers continue finding new and different ways to subjects viewers to more and more commercial content. Since most of us now watch games in HD, the dissonance is increased by bright vivid colors and volume levels that are significantly louder than the game itself. Combine that with the seeming increase in the frequency of commercial breaks and the demonstrable irrelevance of the content of most commercials to the game they’re interrupting, and it’s frankly maddening.
The frequency of commercial breaks, combined with the dissonance, the visual excess, and the content of commercials leaves me increasingly frustrated. Yes, I have a mute button on my remote, and I use it frequently, but while that removes the noise from the equation, it does nothing to ease the frustration I feel with seeing a football game treated as little more than just another commercial delivery system.
I realize that I’m probably pissing into the wind, but at what point does enough become too much? When does it become more about the game and less about the commercials? I can’t imagine that I’m the only one experiencing this sort of frustration, and yet the problem seems to grow worse with each passing season. It’s the National FOOTBALL League, not the National COMMERCIAL League, remember??
