Pretzels, commercials, and Peyton Manning

It's just about that time of year again. Time for me to draft for my imaginary football team in a league featuring 11 other guys I know mostly from high school and college. All in the name of fulfilling my childhood dream of winning a superbowl right from my own home. It should be pretty magical.

My team's name? The Potter Muggles.

There is a spirited debate within my family and among some close friends about whether fantasy football is awesome or lame. On the one hand, I have paid much more attention to the NFL since starting a fantasy team. Keeping tabs on the players on my team has forced me to keep tabs on divisions outside the AFC West.

On the other hand, this also causes a perverse situation for die-hard fans. Some actually start to actually care more about their fantasy team than their real team. A Kansas City Chiefs fan might find himself cheering for Denver if he happens to have Peyton Manning on his fantasy team. And that's. Just. Wrong.

This leads me to wonder: What is it exactly that draws us to sporting events? Is it the actual sporting event? Or is it all the extra "stuff" surrounding it? I'd like to think most people truly want to see a good game and that that's the primary reason they go. But owners and league officials have a tendency to take the focus more and more away from the actual game.

Take football for example. Logically, with 15 minute quarters, a professional football game should feature an hour of action. Throw in timeouts and clock stoppages, it would take a little over two hours to complete a game.

But in the first seven weeks of 2011, the average NFL game time surpassed three hours. There are several reasons for this. Commercial breaks. Flags being thrown by officials. Commercial breaks. Pass-happy offenses. Commercial breaks. It's becoming just a little bit ridiculous.

Last year Christina and I went with my family to the Alamo Bowl (my brother Matthew lived in San Antonio) and that game started at 8:00 p.m. but went until about midnight during a 67-56 game. It was a high-scoring game. Know what that means? We spent about half our time there watching the players stand around while the networks went to commercial break. What's sad is that this was an exciting game featuring future NFL stud Robert Griffin III. It would have been even better if we didn't have to sit around for an extra hour.

Now that's not an issue with the fans, really, but the owners and league officials. There has got to be a better way to sell ad space than stopping the action for two minutes of commercials. Heck, they could do what soccer does: sell ad space on the jerseys if you have to. But don't stop the action.

I have a similar issue with baseball. Not because of the amount of time the game takes, really, but because of how slow the action can sometimes be. According to the New York Times: 

"The average time of games has ballooned from 2 hours 33 minutes in 1981 to 2 hours 58 minutes in 2013 — tying the 33-year high — even though a recent study by The Wall Street Journal found that the average game has only 18 minutes of actual action." 

Think about what's going on during most of the game: A new pitcher is brought on and he needs his warm-up throws. A batter steps up to the plate and winds up. The pitch comes in. Ball one. Batter steps out of the box so that he can tighten his wrist straps he just fastened 90 seconds ago. He takes  a practice swing. Then another. Then he steps back to the plate. The pitcher looks. Takes his stance. Then throws to first to try to catch the runner. He's safe. Batter steps out again and repeats the process. Seven-year-olds in the stands start asking for popcorn. 

You go to a baseball game and what do you see? Fans playing solitaire on their phones. Texting. Reading books. Drinking beer. Now, it's nice to hang out at a baseball game with friends and get some fresh air, but that's not something that's related to the game itself, is it? That's part of the "extra stuff." 

Certainly there's always the history and mythology of the game. It always will be "the Great American Pastime." But for me, anyway, that's something that's more likely to get me to go outside and play catch or go watch a baseball movie rather than watch a game on TV. The running joke with my brother Michael is that whenever a baseball team loses it's because "they didn't BELIEVE enough."

The Rookie was actually filmed 10 minutes from where we lived in Texas at the time. 

There's a bit of complacency by fans when teams do poorly, as well. Your team might lose, but that's no reason to have a bad time. After all, "there's always next week." Or, "there's always next year." Heck, you got to buy a jumbo bag of peanuts! How cool is that? Dang, these peanuts can be tricky to open. Better take my eyes away from the batter warming up to get at these little buggers...

Part of me wishes there was some sort of punishment for teams that play awful, but the opposite is true more often than not. Underperforming teams get the first pick in the draft. Some owners that don't invest much in the team have proven that they can still turn a profit, maybe even a bigger profit than if they'd shelled out money for better athletes. The incentive is gone. And as long as fans are happy just going out and "having a good time" then that's not going to change.

I have no idea what I'm advocating here. I don't know how exactly you change an entire culture, but I think I am lamenting how often the focus of sports turns away from the action and turns towards anything else. Keep in mind that I love football, baseball, basketball, and a host of other sports as well. But if I find myself focusing more on pretzels, commercials, or Peyton Manning before the Chiefs, it's not a fantasy that something is wrong with this picture.