Stupor Bowl Sunday

Today, Sunday, there is a sporting event, or rather there are lots of sporting events, just like every other Sunday, but one of them is a football playoff.  BFD; Big Deal.  Generally in sports you can count on one thing; the greater the hype, the more of a snoozer the game is.  This is called a playoff, but it's not really.  Baseball has playoffs; the teams meet for a series of games thus taking away the little quirks, chance events, luck, referees, more or less, so you have some certainty which is the better team.  That's not the way it is in football.  Even the goofy shaped ball is designed to bounce funny to add some more randomness to the out come.  The time was TPP liked sports, pretty much, but never at the level of rabid fan.  Mostly it didn't matter who won as long as the event was entertaining, and should any of you have forgotten, that's what pro sports is, entertainment.  One of the things that makes the Stupor Bowl boring is that all the commercial breaks interrupt the flow of the game, but to make enough money to pay for at least one of the quarterbacks, the show has to be dragged out as long as possible with commentators using inane remarks in a sad effort to inject energy.  My best analysis of why pro sports seem so boring to me in particular can be summed up on a two-fold basis.  One, maturity, intellectually.  It's boring because it's actually boring, mostly.  Two, free agency.  You used to know who was on your team, who played for your team, who your guys were, and now with players and coaches functioning as interchangeable pieces, you're supposed to cheer for the uniform, the city/region, who, what?  TTP is old enough to remember that baseball was the only major sport, football and basketball were minor sports.  My college had two winter sports that were bigger fan draws than basketball (hockey and wrestling), and there was no football team at all.  Being a team fan all came to an end when Pete Rose became a free-agent and was bought by the Phillies.  What the heck was this!  How are such things possible?  And then it hit you. The athletic entertainers do it for the money, not the fans.  Good thing Downton Abbey is on PBS.