Longish post incoming:
As someone who likes football, the NFL is probably the most overrated spectating experience amongst American sports and it dawned on me when I realized that most people who’re tuning every Sunday are doing it for reasons that have almost nothing to do with the actual on field product.
Your typical casual/intermediate fan is watching because of fantasy/gambling or for the social experience. Gambling is a no brainer so I won’t elaborate on that but in terms of the social aspect, football is once a week and they only play 17 games a season so it’s easy to keep up with the games and it almost becomes an “event” that some people can plan their week around. The amount of times I’ve been to a Sunday get together where they had football on the TV (an easy and inoffensive choice) but no one was actually paying attention is insane.
This phenomena is even more rampant during the Super Bowl. In which you get a large influx of additional casual viewers (especially women), many of whom couldn’t give 2 fukks about the game and just wanna see the funny/cool commercials, the halftime performance, or want to feel apart of something bc the Super Bowl is damn near a holiday in this country.
When you remove a lot of those outside factors and just consume football for what it is, you realize that it can be extremely dry. A matchup between two bad football teams is borderline unwatchable if there are no external implications like fantasy or gambling. The games run too long, stoppages are excessive (timeouts, ads, penalties, overuse of replays), and actual onfield action is limited. There’s only about 11 minutes of action in a football game—they did a study where they counted seconds from snap to play completion and aggregated it and that’s what they found. The NFL is pretty good at finding ways to distract you from that fact, but especially in a game between two bad/mediocre teams, there’s only so much hiding you can do and the flaws of the sport become highly apparent. Needless to say it’s been especially apparent this year because there’s an extreme amount of mediocrity in the league right now and very few, if any, elite teams.
The NFL themselves are aware of this, which is why they’ve created a product like Redzone. And every year I see an increasing amount of people who almost exclusively consume their football through Redzone and now struggle to watch full length games.
Again if you’re really just looking at this purely as sport for sport, basketball is far more entertaining, at least in my opinion. NFL football thrives off of getting people invested through a myriad of things that have nothing to do with the actual on field product, because when you really only focus on the sport itself you realize that shyt is pretty boring.
