I turned off the second half of the Super Bowl last night.

I hadn't watched a lot of the first half because I had to cook dinner (hey, gotta eat), but what I did look in on was not especially inspiring -- two teams with a strong defense just slugging out yardage to get close enough for field goals. There were no touchdowns by either team in the first half.

I did watch the halftime show, which was excellent, but once that was over, I managed to give the game maybe another two or three plays before saying "Nope, this is gonna be tedious all the way through and we're going to lose," and I turned it off and went upstairs to get back to work on catching up on dialogue writing.

I've reached a point in my life where I do try to keep up with sports news a fair bit, not because I'm reverting to form in my old age -- my family is not actually noted for having Sports Fan Gene, and though my father was known to watch a football game now and again, and took me to one of my very few lifetime attended-in-person sports events (a soccer game, of all thing, and it's a semi-interesting story I'll tell some other day), I would not say he was a sports fan in any sense of the word. Nor am I.

I think I've gotten more interested in sports news in recent years because we all need as many distractions from the impending collapse of democracy in the United States as we can get. The stakes are refreshingly low, because pro sports don't matter. They contribute culturally to civilization, for sure, but nothing more concrete. I mean, sports do not change the world. Despite some folks' attempts to hang larger social and political issues on it, whoever wins and loses a particular event makes absolutely no difference to anyone. Unless you bet on the game. Which you shouldn't.

The nice thing about reading sports news is you don't actually have to care about any of it. None of it sends you into depressive spirals or gives you a sinking feeling of hopelessness. It's just fun and games. This, I think, is why so many people are willing to overlook the political baggage that professional football, in particular, has been carrying around for many years. The extremely poor character of some of the players (two vital Patriots players only managed to play out the season because their arraignments were delayed until after the Super Bowl). The show-me-the-money naked greed. The racism. The sexism. The politics of many team owners, who by and large are horrible people. The head injuries and the league's continuing denial about them. Et cetera. It's like, "Can you just let us have this? Please? We'll go back to the trashfire tomorrow."

Unfortunately, this carefree approach breaks down if you make the mistake of actually developing any kind of personal attachment to the outcome, and I came a little too close to that this year. The problem is that there were two people in the Patriots organization that seemed to be generally good people -- the young quarterback Drake Maye, and coach Mike Vrabel. Everybody likes them. They're doing a good job. They're trying their best. They seem to have no skeletons in their closets so far. (I have a strong suspicion that Maye might be a godly type -- that is not intended as a positive -- the way he talks about some things, and the location and circumstances of his upbringing -- but as long as he stays discreet about it, I'm going to pretend it's OK.)

However, I didn't stop watching the game because the Patriots were clearly losing. I stopped watching it because it was boring -- too boring to deal with the annoyances.

As I said on social media last night, here are the things that annoy me about watching sports on television:
- The advertisements
- The commentators/announcers
- The sideline interviews and other "color" spots
- The endless hype, graphics, logos, and other bullshit
- Basically anything that is not footage of the people actually playing the game

I feel the same way about sports commentators that I do about sports columnists: There is not a lot they can actually say, but straightforward play-calling does not fill the time and space they are required to fill, so they fill it up with inane blather. But -- and this is the reason I prefer to read things than watch them -- words in print are less intrusive; you can skim them in your own time and in your own way. With the commentators during a televised sports event, the best you can do is mute the television. This greatly improves the experience.

But even if you watch the game muted, you still have to deal with all the interruptions.

One advantage soccer has over football is that, in general, that clock don't stop for shit. They start, they play, they keep playing, they don't pause every thirty seconds for whatever. (This is also why television money hates soccer. Not enough places to cram in ads. And, interestingly, I've heard that it's why some sports-fan types hate soccer: not enough places to go get more Doritos or take a piss.)

Unfortunately, except very occasionally, soccer is tedious to watch. Somewhere up there at the top of this piece I commented that the game last night was boring because it was all defense, a slow fight for yardage with no breakout scoring drives or any plays which might be interesting to watch. The most enjoyable thing in any football game is a player making a long run down the field and seeing if anybody can manage to tackle him before he makes a touchdown. All soccer games at the pro level are defensive slugfests, and worse, the higher the level of play, the more boring it gets. World Cup games are very low-scoring games; often it comes down to the first team to manage to score a single point.

(And the goalie in soccer has far too much power -- though is not as overpowered as in hockey, where the goalie can basically block the entire net with his body just by standing in front of it.)

You want to make football more interesting? I know how to make football more interesting. But it'll never happen; there are all kinds of cultural reasons and money reasons why it won't happen.

First, lose the specialization. Specialization is for insects. Recruit players who can run and throw and catch and dodge and tackle -- with a caveat on that last bit.

Get rid of most of the armor. Since you also are getting rid of the players whose only merit to the game is that they are a two-hundred-seventy-five pound wall of beef that can't do anything but stop another player like a train collision, these two things, taken together, will immediately reduce the brutality level of the game; players will not be able to make or take the hard hits with impunity, and the side effect of this is there will be fewer injuries and ruined bodies, and also the game will get more interesting since the defensive play becomes "impede this player from proceeding" rather than "drag him to the ground and/or knock him into next week."

Bring back the lateral. When was the last time in a US football game you saw anybody but the quarterback throw the ball? This is a side effect of that specialization we talked about in the first part. Nobody but the quarterback is recruited for their ability to throw the ball, so passes between other players have disappeared. Imagine a game where defensive players are forced to chase a ball that could change hands numerous times as the offensive players switched control to one another as the situation got too hot to handle.

Remove a lot of the reasons to pause play. Keep that fucking clock running.

If you did all this stuff, you'd have a game that's a hell of a lot more interesting. Unfortunately, you would also have a game that already exists. It's called league-rules rugby, and it's a joy to watch. I got hooked on it while we were visiting Australia and New Zealand. All you have to do is switch from a kickoff to a scrum and that's what you got. And it has never even so much as penetrated the consciousness of Americans. It's not played in this country. It's not broadcast in this country. The average American sports fan is barely aware that rugby even exists.

In fact, the evidence seems to be that the average American sports fan likes football as the hot mess it is, which makes me think that maybe the average American deserves what they get.

But I'm in a bad mood today so you probably shouldn't take that too seriously. After all, my team lost last night.