Football: TV's Pastime

I was watching two NFL games this afternoon on TV, the Vikings-Lions on FOX Sports and the Chiefs-Raiders on CBS. As is my wont (I’m a casual fan, with no particular allegiance to any team) I would click the Recall button on the remote whenever the game I was watching went to commercial. It didn’t take me long to experience something I’ve noticed more this season than I have in the past: At least half the time, when I left one game that had gone to commercial, I found that the other game was also in commercial. This struck me as odd, assuming a random pattern of commercial breaks, supposedly determined by the natural stoppage of action. But on reflection, football is, perhaps more so than any other sport, ideally suited for commercial interruption. The plays are brief. There are regular changes of possession. And there are in the rules allowance for “official” (originally “TV”) time outs and the “two-minute warning.” Several times during any one game, it’s not uncommon to go to a commercial following a score, come back for the kick-off, and then go immediately to another commercial following the kick return. Truth is, the commercial breaks are indeed random, but that roughly half of the time of any football game is taken up with advertising, which is why you get the roughly 50% clicking from commercial to commercial, rather than commercial to game.

Common thinking over the past twenty or thirty years is that football overcame baseball as our national pastime because there is more “action,” or more continuous action in football, and therefore more suited to our contemporary fast-paced, short-attention-span culture.* But the truth is that that’s not true. According to two studies done by The Wall Street Journal last year, one about football, the second about baseball, baseball actually has a bit more action (pitch to end of play) than football (snap to end of play):

What football broadcasts do is analyze over replays rather than analyze over “standing around” between the action, thereby creating an illusion of “continuous action,” further enhanced by the many commercials interspersed between brief series of play. If you’re sitting in a stadium at a football game, you certainly don’t get the same sense of continuous action that those watching on TV get (although in recent years, most stadiums have added instant replays and commercial breaks on their JumboTrons in order to provide that in-home TV experience for those who spend hundreds of dollars per game on tickets, parking, and food).

No, football didn’t overtake baseball as America’s pastime because of action. If that were the criterion, the most popular sports would be soccer (by rule, continuous action) and golf (always several people making shots). Football became the most popular American sport because sport is primarily TV programming, and broadcasters have made it the sport most amenable to commercial TV. Football first became TV’s pastime, then America’s.

*An argument could be made, though isn’t loudly by many, that football’s popularity is due to its violent nature being suited to our violent culture, and I wouldn’t argue against that being a factor in the phenomenon. It certainly helps explain the rise in popularity of NASCAR and mixed martial arts (though both of these are also well-made for commercial TV).