Day: December 13, 2005

I tried to watch the MNF game last night – I really did. But the third quarter was arduous. The teams were partly to blame. During the quarter, there were six penalties and eight punts. Eight punts?

Compounding the problem were all the commercial breaks. Over the first nine minutes of the quarter, there were five commercial breaks. Considering each commercial break is 2-3 minutes, that’s 10-15 minutes of commercials for nine minutes of actual game time. The quarter started at 11:06 ET and ended at 11:59, for a total of 53 minutes. The game is only supposed to last until midnight and at that point, there was still a quarter to play!

We, as a nation, are assaulted by advertising and marketing campaigns every day, and it’s only getting worse. A couple of years ago, the NFL made a rule change – the clock will continue to run for most of the game even when a player steps out of bounds. But the games are still lasting 3+ hours. So all this rule change provides is an opportunity to show more commercials. Isn’t the NFL making enough money?

Last night was an example of how the game is being ruined. It was already a poorly played game, but the fact that we had to take five commercial breaks in nine minutes made it that much more difficult to watch.

I wonder when we, as a nation, will get fed up with this deluge of marketing and advertising and how exactly we’ll revolt.