As national signing day has come and gone, it seems like we might have a small break to go into football detox.
However, we are wrong.
After the Pro Bowl this weekend, in which our favorite NFL players will do their best to not get injured, pro football free agency will start, beginning months of speculation of who will get the franchise tag, get signed by another team or get paid lucrative contracts. Just after free agency comes the NFL Draft, which turns into a two-day extravaganza of speculation, top-10 lists and countless reports from ESPN’s draft team of Mel Kiper Jr., Todd McShay and John Clayton.
Just when we thought we would get a break from the game, the college game gets back into swing. Around the same time the draft ends, reports come in from spring practices and games among the college ranks. Preseason rankings are made by college football experts, and they are already discussing who could make it to the national championship which, at that point, is still eight months away.
As the rookies from the draft are beginning to sign with their respective teams, we hit NFL training camp, where athletes who have multi-million dollar contracts sleep in dorm rooms and gather on fields in summer’s blazing heat to get into shape for the season. Following that, we get the nonsensical NFL preseason, in which teams figure out their rosters and bide time until the regular season.
With 24/7, 365-days-a-year coverage of football, it shows how obsessed we are with the sport. Even in the “dog days of summer” when baseball is at its finest, headlines are seen from NFL training camps about rookie holdouts or Terrell Owens doing sit-ups in his driveway again.
Our obsession with football goes far beyond any other sport. The Super Bowl gets more coverage than any other championship series or game than the other major sports. The BCS bowl games get more coverage than most playoff series. This year’s Super Bowl drew 95.4 million viewers, which is huge compared to the 13.6 million viewers the World Series averaged per night in 2008 and 14.9 million viewers per night the Celtics-Lakers NBA Finals attracted.
Even if more people watched the Super Bowl than other championship series because it was a one-night affair, that amount of viewers is staggering. Super Bowl XLIII was the third most watched television event in history, trailing behind last year’s Super Bowl between the Giants and the Patriots and the series finale of “M*A*S*H.”
With so many people tuning into various professional and college football events, it brings up the question of whether football is America’s sport or if baseball remains America’s pastime.
Baseball has traditionally been America’s favorite sport. It is the game we grow up playing and the one that continues to draw fans across the country. It is the game most people can play, and movies about it can bring any man to tears when he hears someone ask his father’s ghost to “have a catch.” But, even during the dog days of summer, there is always football. Before training camps start and mini-camps end, the Arena League starts play, giving us our gridiron fix until the pros started playing again.
Football, on the other hand, is one of the prevalent sports on both the collegiate and professional levels. There are only 85 Division I baseball programs compared to the over 100 FBS football programs. On the professional level, NFL teams continue to bring in more fans per game than baseball does.
No matter what your opinion is on what our national pastime is or what America’s favorite sport is, football seems to be our nation’s current obsession. Constant stream of news over the Internet and on TV shows we can’t get enough football.
Ben Solochek is a senior majoring in journalism and history. Think we are obsessed with football, too? E-mail him at [email protected].
