The NFL on television is a commercial failure: Bill Livingston

Bill Livingston

CLEVELAND, Ohio -- Hell is pro football on television.

Since the 1950s, we have been told the NFL is the perfect sport for television.

Its pace is perfect, neither as slow as baseball nor as fast as basketball. It holds a committee meeting after every play when teams huddle to call a new play, so the previous one can be shown in slow motion, reverse-angle replay for those in the audience who missed it the first time around.

Its appeal is, in large part, its violence. There is a voracious appetite for vicarious violence in this country. Replays lovingly re-create collisions. Baseball has the ballet of the Omar Vizquels around the second-base bag; basketball has LeBron James or Kobe Bryant in the sky; and the NFL, its solicitous murmurs about the danger of concussions aside, has what John Madden, the most popular analyst of the age, happily called "slobber-knockers."

The NFL is so popular that it is all over the networks, as inescapable as "The Bachelor" or "Survivor: Wizards Locker Room." The rights fees are so enormous that the only way the networks can make a profit is to run a stream of commercials during games that are so obnoxious as to rival (depending on your political viewpoint) the talking heads at Fox News or MSNBC.

It takes less than 10 seconds, immediately after the opening kickoff, to get hit by the first commercials. Think about that.

The viewer endures the whole commercial-saturated pregame show and the five-minute "scene setter" from the broadcast booth. Then, one guy kicks the ball, another guy either takes a knee in the end zone or runs it out, usually to around the 20- or 25-yard line, and then here come the commercials again: the guys playing paintball for Bud Lite, the guy wondering how he's going to talk to the doctor about ED, the Dominos guys admitting their pizza rated just above eating the cardboard carton it came in until they changed their recipes.

A score near the end of a quarter is a particularly vile development. The hapless viewer gets a first fusillade of shilling after the touchdown or (more likely) field goal, followed by the kickoff and 10 seconds of kneeling down with the ball in the end zone maybe. Then, they fire off another volley of commercials. Seconds later, the quarter ends, followed by a third barrage of commercials. "No mas," I say, and I don't even speak Spanish.

When Arizona beat Green Bay, 51-45, in overtime Sunday in the highest-scoring playoff game ever, the track meet kept stopping in its tracks for commercials.

The Fox network tried, within the financial constraints imposed by the need to pay the bills, to maintain the high pitch of the drama. There was, for example, no commercial break after Green Bay recovered a surprise onside kick in the second half. The momentum of the game demanded that Arizona's defenders not get a commercial-induced pause to collect their thoughts. So, one of the best moments of the game got better for being commercial-free.

Otherwise, however, it was the same old stuff: the Benjamin Button baby who was born middle-aged and still knew he preferred Burger King to McDonald's; beer, trucks and Viagra; Elmer Fudd hunting wabbits for Geico. (Say, what happened to the little cockney gecko? First the dumb cavemen, now an animated cartoon character. I love that little lizard, guv'nor. It's my only commercial weakness.)

But the Super Bowl commercials that kick off major ad campaigns have become a popular focus of the telecast. Programs devoted to the best commercials from here and other countries crop up year round, like dandelions in the spring.

Allstate has a perfect-pitch commercial, deploring materialism in the wake of the financial crash. But apparently, it has no legs. People love material things and the commercials about them. It might be impossible to kill the golden goose.

As for me, I've got to get TiVo.