It's not just that The Patriots lost the game to Baltimore on a last-minute field goal. It's not because of replacement referees calling phantom penalties. And since I am retired, I do not have to get up for work on a Monday morning, so it isn't because the game - which takes 3 plus hours - requires viewers to stay up until midnight or later.
No, gentle readers, the reason I am giving-up Sunday Night Football is because the games are no longer interesting enough to justify the time spent watching them. Granted there are often moments when the contests are exciting, even thrilling to football fans, but these moments are few.
I blame it on the greed of networks and players and management, which have combined to deliver to TV viewers an empty spectacle of hype and players and coaches mainly standing around or lying on the ground. These scenes of inactivity are punctuated by an astounding number of commercial breaks, or sideline interviews with know-nothing announcer chicks asking empty-headed questions to bored coaches and players. In my humble opinion the games would be much more interesting if the showed more close-ups on the agreeably buxom, scantily-clad cheerleaders, instead of shots of Al Michaels and the other guy in the booth.
Big money has turned what once was an enjoyable past-time into a hard slog. Money driven disputes over contracts have given us inexperienced officials, which has contributed to a general lack of confidence in the fairness of penalty flags. Both Patriot losses came directly from bogus penalty calls, which clearly affected the outcome of the games. And last night's winning field goal did not look "in" to almost everyone who watched it. But the NFL has warned coaches and announcers not to remark on the ineptness of referees. We might as well be living in Russia. Clearly, no one who is getting paid gives a crap about the integrity of sport or fairness.
You already know how I feel about commercial interruptions, which destroy the sense of flow in a sporting event on TV. It is not enough for them to make us look at advertising all over the walls and playing fields and in the skies, we are assailed by advertising messages it seems every other play, sometimes they will call a referee's time-out forcing a commercial break in the game.
I have had enough. Sunday nights, from now on, I'll be clicking over to Masterpiece Theater on PBS.
