Why Football is Unwatchable

Every fall and through the winter, Americans become obsessed with a strange sport they call football. It is not uncommon to spend entire weekends dedicated to analyzing, watching and then arguing over the game. Offices find themselves running betting pools and of course, for the grand finale, the entire country has a massive chili cook-off to celebrate the Super bowl. With this much interest surrounding the sport one can only assume it's an action packed, compelling game. Unfortunately the opposite is true, American Football is almost completely unwatchable.

Some might argue that the vast popularity of football is proof that the sport has merit. This might sound like a reasonable argument, but only until you realize that Twinkies and Budweiser are hugely popular food stuffs. Football has gained its position through clever marketing, not from the inherent quality of the game.

So what exactly is the problem with football? The reasons are almost to plentiful to mention, but here is a list of the most glaring flaws with football.

It requires no creativity

Most sports require the athletes to display split second decision making and creative thinking. While there are some aspects of this in American Football, it is sorely lacking. Teams spend a massive amount of energy developing and drilling a play book which is collection of pre-design plays. For most teams the players aren't even allowed to call their own plays, instead the upcoming play is radioed in from the coach on the sideline. The play then proceeds as if executed by robots. "Run 20 yards then turn left". The plays in football are so static that if a wide receiver turns the wrong way the play falls apart as the ball sails into no mans land. There are of course moments of creative expression in football, typically when running with the ball or calling audibles, but even in these cases the play follows a pretty scripted path. The predictability of football makes it boring to watch

No action

While the game of football itself is uninspiring, at least it is more fun to watch than commercials and people standing around. For some reason though, football is designed to be almost exclusively people standing around doing nothing interrupted by frequent commercial breaks. If someone plays actual football for more than 10 seconds it's almost unheard of. Most of the game consists of 3 second long bursts of 'action' followed by half a minute of standing around in a huddle. As if this wasn't mindblowingly boring enough, they have decided to add a generous amounts of time outs and instant replay reviews to slow down the game even more. The result is that watching a football game will have you spending about ten times as much time watching Budweiser commercials as the actual sport.

It is played by sissies

Football likes to portray itself as the direct ancestor of the Roman gladiator sports. The image is reinforced by always having lots of explosions, mean robots and lots of sounds of steel on steel in all the commercials for the games. In reality, football is remarkably similar to sissy rugby. As soon as someone falls with the ball, he play is stopped. The players wear huge exoskeletons and helmets. I wouldn't be surprised if they even wear a cup. The exoskeletons make huge crashes when someone runs into each other and makes it seem like players will lose a limb any minute. In reality however, people are hardly ever injured from getting hit. How could you with so much protection? No, when a football player gets injured it is typically muscle pulls caused by one sided explosive training or a broken little finger or similar. There's even an injury called turf toe. In a real mans sport players relocate their dislocated shoulder themselves without leaving the field or play with a broken neck. Football players miss two weeks with turf toe.

It rewards losers

For reasons beyond any comprehension, the NFL sees it as a high level goal to achieve parity in the league. Not only is this a surefire way of creating an army of mediocre teams, it also directly favors losing. The salary cap rules and the mysterious draft process both work towards making it impossible to build a truly dominant team. The more successful your team is, the more depleted the talent pool will get until your safely back with the mediocre fold. The most hair raising concept though is the draft. At the end of the year teams that were incredibly bad are actually rewarded for their uselessness by getting an increased chance of signing the most talented players. In stead of being punished for being terrible, it's actually in a poor teams interest to be as terrible as possible to get a higher draft pick. This stupid mechanism is not only instrumental in promoting mediocrity, it also puts the whole integrity of the game in question as teams can benefit from throwing games.

The games are meaningless

Another massive flaw with American Football is that there is no adverse effects of being bad. In most non-American leagues teams that finish last are relegated out of the league to be replaced by someone who is hopefully somewhat better. Without this sort of tiered system there's basically no reason for most of the games that are played during a season. After the first 4 or 5 weeks a lot of teams no longer has anything to play for. The further the season progresses the more meaningless games there are. With no chance of making the playoffs and no threat of relegation the last 10 weeks of the season turns into a meaningless exercise for many of the teams. As if watching the game itself wasn't terrible enough, trying to watch a 1-5 team is murder. There is no longer a point to their season and everybody knows it, even the players themselves.

Football is in many ways similar to Budweiser. Immensely popular, but when you stop look at the actual product, there is nothing there.