Really good discussion on Reddit:

I’m slowly pulling away from football, and you have nailed one half of the equation for why. Going to the games is actually less enjoyable than watching it on tv.

But then, watching it on tv gets less enjoyable every year. The broadcast is so packed full of advertising it feels like I view more promotions than actual content in any game. Score, commercial, kick, commercial, injury, commercial, time out, commercial, instant replay, commercial. It’s tedious and actively breaks my immersion while watching the game. We get less of a feel for how the game is going because we go to break for timeouts instead if the announcers discussing the situations each team is facing or showing highlights from the current drive.

And the commercials aren’t even the only advertising. The intro to Sunday Night Football is a two minutes advertisement for a phone company, every highlight has a title that awkwardly forces some company into the name, the onscreen graphics flash brand logos instead of constantly revealing useful information, and the pre & post game segments never go more than five seconds without a sponsorships, including awful skits that aren’t in any way entertaining.

Add in the greed of expanded playoffs, teams playing in (or possibly moved to) London, locker room cultures that promote racism and homophobia, merchandise that is always 20% more expensive than it needs to be, an abuse of breast cancer to make money by pandering to female fans while donating less than 5% of proceeds to actual research, threatening to abandon fans in order to force stadium deals that become a hardship on local communities, blackout rules that punish fans for not paying exorbitant prices for attendance, the Super Bowl having only 1% of its tickets available to the general public, the NFL actively suppressing concussion research, the NFL apologizing weekly for something the officials screwed up, expensive tv packages, a lack of internet streaming, and a blind eye to performance enhancing drugs while overreacting to a little pot and at the end of the day my interest in the league is getting seriously close to the last straw.

I don’t know what that straw will be, but I know it’s coming. Culturally popular things rarely implode based on one action. They slowly rot from within, which is already happening for the NFL. It wont be quick, and the NFL is going to get bigger before it fails, but the groundwork has already been laid.

Unless a player dies on the field. Then the whole league craters.

There are a lot of comments, but if you have time, read through some of them.

I agree with virtually everything written here, except for when you’re watching your own team– then most of this stuff gets thrown out. But I can’t sit through a full, non-Eagles, non-RedZone game without distracting myself somehow. I don’t think the NFL has anything to immediately worry about, however. It’s just that the viewing experience kind of stinks.