Boom’s babbling

I tried, off and on last weekend, but I just couldn’t do it.  Maybe my mind is still in baseball mode, maybe it is the fact that football is so ^%$# SLOW!  I have been watching quite a bit of rugby and Aussie rules football the past few weeks, and it is hard for me to watch a game where the players run a play for 4-8 seconds, then take a break for half a minute or more (sometimes MUCH more) before they do anything else.

This has been a problem for a while.  Anymore, I tend to treat football on TV as a radio broadcast, with video highlights.  I can do something else, then look over occasionally when a play actually occurs.  If I mistime it, I have five or six more chances to see it on replay!  I cannot just sit down and watch.

Last week, for the FSU-Miami game, ESPN played around with something on ESPN2, where they had 8 different cameras on the screen at once (it looked like one of the Star Trek 2.0 broadcasts on G4.)  All it showed is how little is going on during a football game.  We got to watch both head coaches stand and occasionally yell into their headsets; the quarterback, whose team is actually playing, listening into his headset; the quarterback, not on the field, standing and doing nothing; a central shot of what is being broadcast on ESPN; a smaller shot of the same thing from another angle; and a couple attempted isolations on what they hope will be important players on the upcoming play (or occasionally nice pictures of the turf.)  In all, it was an excellent example of why a 3 1/2 hour game can be watched easily in 15 minutes, if you tape it.

This entry was posted on Thursday, September 14th, 2006 at 3:45 pm and is filed under Sports. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.