Football on TV

I’ve been watching some football in HD on my big TV this year. Since all HD broadcast options at this time in our history are about as appealing as drinking sewage for lunch, I’ve been doing it over the air. Today my antenna would not pick up FOX, so I watched the game on my Tivo instead. As a result, I missed much of the experience of the live broadcast. 1. The 10 minutes of commercials on either side of a score as they cut away after the extra point and after the kickoff.

2. The interminable video reviews due to challenges or “booth” reviews. The replay rules in the NFL are the dumbest thing to be added to a sports rulebook since they made zone defense illegal in the NBA. They fixed the zone rules in the NBA, the NFL should fix this too.

3. The “reporter on the field” segments. Who are these reporters on the field? This has to be the dregs of the dregs as far as a position in sports broadcasting is concerned.

4. Promos for intellectually offensive series TV on Fox (or CBS). The best are the ones that involve decapitated bodies and bloody stumps in the promo during “family” viewing time.

5. The dozens of on-the-field time outs. The recent fashion here is to call a time out milliseconds before the opposing team snaps the ball for a field goal, so they have to set up and run the whole play again. In the future, doing this should result in an automatic 3 points for the team kicking the field goal and they should be able to run the play again.

6. Bud light commercials.

7. Random booth chatter between plays and after the TV timeouts.

8. The two minute warning. What is this for? Are we really saying that 60 grown men can’t figure out that there are two minutes left in the game?

9. The endless animations of the some combination of the NFL logo and the network TV logo.

10. Those touching “get to know” the player segments where we find out that the quarterback’s favorite band are the Dixie Chicks and he hangs out in leather S&M clubs with his wife and mistress in his spare time. I made that up.

All of this probably accounted for an hour out of a 3+ hour broadcast. It’s really too bad that I lost all of this because my antenna didn’t work right. I wonder if it’s working now. I wonder when there will be an HD Tivo solution that doesn’t require a budget the size of the Department of Defense to acquire.

Capitalism has failed me again.