As a non-American, there is something utterly surreal about watching American football and the Super Bowl. It's a game of four quarters that last fifteen minutes, and yet despite this the game runs for four hours. It is the definition of hyperreal; the event of the Super Bowl has more significance than the actual game itself. People talk about the ads that run and the celebrities who sing to the point it feels like a national holiday for the glorious worship of sportsball.
And then I watch the actual sport and it's stop and start every fucking second like trench warfare, which helps artificially extend the game to this unnecessarily long runtime, and giving them time to run more ads. People call soccer boring, but at least the clock runs the full 45 minutes, plus whatever extra time, followed by another 45 minutes. Even in sports where the clock does stop, like rugby, don't feel the incessant need to pad the runtime past it's 80 minute length. Even when I try and understand the rules of the NFL, I see all this shit to do with divisions and wild cards, and I don't know why it isn't just a knockout table like the FA Cup, or just a typical World Cup model of playing teams in a group stage and then transitioning to a knockout stage.
As a national sportsball, American football seems like one of the lamest sportsballs possible. Convince all those big black guys to transition into rugby so they can go toe to toe with New Zealand Maoris.
