|
 |   |
|
EVENTS Fantasy Central Inside Game Multimedia Central Statitudes Your Turn Message Boards Email Newsletters Golf Guide Cities Work in Sports
CNNSI.com GROUP
COMMERCE
|  |
Sleepless in America Staying up to watch TV sports hard to do these days
Sometime last week, sometime around midnight, in the middle of one of those stupidly drawn-out, mid-inning pitching changes during the World Series -- you know, the Baltimore Ravens score touchdowns more quickly than Joe Torre swaps out pitchers, for crying out loud -- it became way too clear to many millions of us that, like this sentence, televised professional sports matches just go on way, way, way too long nowadays. There's an NFL game Monday night. Begins at 9 p.m. ET. Will end, you have to figure, a bit past midnight. Unless it's like last week's overtime game, which finished up past 1 a.m. It's absolutely ridiculous. Pro sports on TV have, simply, become too hard to watch. Too physically demanding. Just too much to endure, even for the die-hards. And no one is listening to the tired, huddled fans out there on this one. Sure, baseball's Bud Selig is trying to cut down baseball games, which ran an ungodly two hours, 58 minutes, on average, in 2000. That's up 11 minutes from just two years ago. The NBA has tried to address time problems, especially the last couple minutes. Watching an NBA game, especially in so-called "crunch time," is like watching a Suzanne Somers infomercial. Flick through all the channels, it's still there the next time through. Still, the games start late, they drag on, the commercials pound us, the calendar pages flip by like something out of a 1930s movie. And there are those who continue to wonder why ratings are dropping. Do any of the people in charge know what they are asking? Do they have any idea of what it takes to watch just one of these games? Look at the Series. New Yorkers, because they evidently were the only ones who stayed up for the games, went to work last week looking like a few million zombies. At least more like a few million zombies. And this Monday Night Football thing. There aren't a lot of people who can make it through an entire Monday night game -- mid-season report card on this trio of announcers, by the way: Zzzzzz -- without catching a couple winks on the sofa. Where it used to be an automatic, these days you have to do some thinking before you sit down with your bag of chips and beverage of choice. You have to ask yourself a few questions: 1. Do I care if I'm awake for the end of the game? 2. Do I really want to sit through dozens of car and beer commercials? 3. Do I really need to be at work at 8 a.m.? 4. Is it worth the effort? Sure, there are the lucky fans who live an hour or two or three behind the East Coast start times, and they may be able to stick it out. But, even then, it's no party. You still have to put up with the commercials, the pitching changes, the 16 timeouts in the last 30 seconds. You still have to be bombarded with inane comments from experts. You're still lucky if you can get in a solid eight hours. There are no easy answers to this. Baseball will work on cutting a minute or two off the times of games. But starting times, especially for the World Series, won't change drastically. David Stern will work on streamlining NBA games, but you still have to want to watch the NBA. That's hard enough. The 8 p.m. ET start time for Monday Night Football a couple years back didn't work, and instant replay seems to have lengthened pro football games. Nothing there seems likely to change. So we're stuck with late nights and early mornings and advertisers dictating when we watch. Of course, we could always not watch. Which, if you look at the ratings for the Series and MNF and the Olympics, is looking like a more viable alternative to many. But that's no option for the millions of true sports fiends out there, those who would rather watch sports on TV than watch anything else. There are no answers at all for those people. Well, there is one. Get some sleep. John Donovan is a senior writer for CNNSI.com. The opinions expressed here are solely those of the writer. Comments? To e-mail Donovan, click here.
| ||||||||||||||||
