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I watch a lot of football. But apparently not as much as I thought. HA!
I wondered why you tweeted the length of the National anthem.
Maybe this 12-14 minute play time is what makes the game so popular. Not only does it pack all the action into 5-8 second segments but it also I leaves oodles of time for diagnosis and opinion making… and everyone likes to give their opinion.
Basketball and Ice Hockey (in particular) are such fast games it they leave less time for diagnosis.
Thanks for the break down!
I think football is the perfect “American” sport for precisely those reasons. You get 5 seconds of excitement followed by a breather period which is about four to five times longer.
Basketball has a slow period as the offense brings the ball up the court since most teams play a half-court defense for most of the game.
One reason I believe that soccer is not bigger in America is because there are no pauses in the game—no time for people to go to the bathroom, go get food/drink from the kitchen, and when watching in a bar, no time to converse with friends. It takes entirely too much concentration, for too long, for most Americans to enjoy it.
i too have commented on the simmilar circumstances in the cfl some years ago when discussing the merits/demerits of soccer vs football with several collegues;since i was mainly a fan of the round ballsport. it appears that north americans have engendered in their psyche an all encompassing attention span as dictated by the various commercial media over the past half century; which appears to me to becomming proportionally ever shorter and more verbose per second as time goes on.
the other observation i would like to make is the need for radio announcer descriptions of the play by play speakers which seem to drivel on without end despite being displayed on a visual medium ie. tv. a good look at the english broadcasters of the eighties (i stress this time frame because even their more recent efforts boggle the mind with more and more obvious verbose descriptions of the goings on that none but a blind person could miss if watching the game)
i have on occasion contemplated wheather the network announcers do this in order to help the martha stewarts of the world to continue in the kitchen or the craftsroom not miss any of the occasional sporatic disjointed action occurring on the screen; but have come to the conclusion that the networks figue they have dumbed us down so far that we no longer recognise whats on the screen so we need the aural aid so profusely provided.
i hope i’m not too cynical in my old age but is there any hope of stopping this dumbing down? are newspapers doomed as well?
thank-you for your excellent arbitrage of the facts on ball-in-motion statisics. they
tend to make you wonder why its not called a broadcast of commercials interspersed with football.
kind regards
i remain
gert rutters
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