Quality Time? I Think Not

Do you want to spend more quality time with your family? Are you sick to death with all those pharmaceutical commercials on TV? Do you scramble for the mute button every time a gorgeous female starts spouting the virtues of a certain bedroom enhancement pill that could cause you to have a four hour medical catastrophe requiring a doctor? Do three or five sportscasters talking at once while yucking’ it up like a bunch of southern hillbillies make your ‘hears’ close shut?

If you answered yes to any or all of the above then you have a problem. If you love football, then you also love all the statistics that get tossed your way every Sunday afternoon for nearly seven months straight.

Here are some stats that may cause you to curb your enthusiasm about Americas favorite sport. If the absurd money some of these “marquise” players get for playing a game doesn’t turn you off then maybe the following stats will give you pause to watch something else on Sunday or maybe even take the kids camping for the weekend.

This is what you get in 28 games of pro football. (Approximate numbers, Horace).

Let’s just say you enjoy the half hour pre game show and the half hour post game show and the three and a half hours or so of game time. You will sit in front of the idiot box 126 hours or five and a quarter DAYS!

Let me try to put this all in perspective for you.

There will be the obligatory 12 commercial minutes per hour. Just about what your favorite one hour show will have. Not bad, you say? But wait, there’s more. We mustn’t overlook the three time outs per team per half plus the couple or so :30 time outs. (or is that times out?)

Next I noticed there is a two minute or so TO after each possession change and there could be as many as 30 to 40 possession changes every game each yielding another 2 plus minutes of ads.

Injury time outs will average eight per game. Most of the time they have the injured player towed off or hauled off the field by the time the TO is over and the ads seen. Then there’s the challenge flags. Each team gets two or three challenges per half with each challenge producing yet another 2 plus minutes of advertisements.

Then, of course there’s the fifteen minute half time activity which will yield yet another five minutes of ads. Are you getting the picture yet? Is a camping trip to the Amazon or a two week vacation to Toenny starting to sound pretty good?

Then we sit through one of the most dumber of the times out in pro football. The infamous two minute warning. This is nothing less than a media imposed time out. I mean, how often do you see any one of the seven or nine coaches on the sidelines look at the clock? About every 10 seconds? It’s surprising to me they don’t get whip lash! Who needs a warning that there is just two minutes left in the game? Every coach, player, water girl, fan and referee knows exactly how much time is left. And BTW I have seen the last two minutes of the game drag on for 30 minutes, haven’t you?

Anyway, by my fractured mathematics there are about four hours of ads, half time entertainment (which sometimes has trouble in “con-tainment” if you will recall the Janet Jackson debacle), pre game, post game, times out, re runs and announcer chatter in this contest of super egos and in-your-face posturing leaving (by NFL League estimation, not mine alone) slightly less than 11 minutes of actual football action, meaning from the time the ball is snapped from the center to the quarterback until one of the seven or so Zebras blow a wheezle indicating the play is over. Just blowing into a whistle doesn’t always stop the action however. Just the clock. The players sometimes will “play” long after the whistle supposedly stopped the action.

Eleven minutes of “fresh” action in a four and a half hour period of time. You get a better bargain watching golf!

That’s it for now folks. Thanks for listening.