sportsjabber.net

Hello, this is a feature that will run through the entire season and aims to recap the weekend’s events and boils those events down to one admittedly superficial fact or stupid opinion about each team. Feel free to complain about it.

Last night, the most-watched and beloved annual sporting event in America took place, and once again was a wildly successful affair that you all surely enjoyed.

Tens of millions of people tuned in for every second of the game with bated breath waiting for the deciding play to happen. And that, once again, gave the National Hockey League the chance to finally learn a thing or two about how to start better marketing itself so that it can finally become more than a fringe-sport afterthought in the minds of nearly all Americans.

One of the reasons football gained so much television exposure in its early days, the better to foster its current immense popularity, is that the league executives went to every network on hand and knee saying, “What can we possibly do to make the game more appealing to you as a property?” And television executives likely leaned back in their chairs with a wry smile and noted that the pace of the game in those days was far too fast.

“Where,” they must surely have asked, “are we supposed to squeeze in two hours’ worth of insultingly troglodytic potato chip ads and misogynistic light beer commercials?”

So the NFL did what any right-thinking league would do: It bent to the will of its corporate masters and stretched a game in which there’s 60 minutes on the play clock so that it takes about 200 minutes to complete. And by the time the Super Bowl rolls around, that 200 minutes stretches to a little more than 240. That’s how you get on major networks without having playoff overtimes preempted by horse race pregame shows.

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