American Football

Posted: January 30, 2012 | | Categories: Miscellaneous

If you know me, you likely know that I'm a big Soccer fan. I regularly irritate my wife by calling American Football...well, you know - American Football. It amazes me that the entire world (except for the United States and possibly Cananda) calls a sport Football but for us in North America it means something completely different. That being said, I've been trying to expose my son to the sport so he'll be able to fit in better than I do (wink).

So, for the last few years, I've actually tried to pay more attention to the sport. For last year's Super Bowl, I actually knew who was playing before game day - which is something very rare for me. I even watched the whole game and enjoyed it. This year, I took my son on a Carolina Panther Stadium Tour and the next day a friend of ours gave me two excellent tickets to watch a game, so I went.

The whole family even sat down the week before last and watched an entire afternoon of Football (there, I didn't call it American Football – although I wanted to).

So, I'm excited for the Super Bowl game on Sunday and I went to the NFL web site (www.nfl.com) to see when the game started. I, of course, was struck by a couple of things I saw there.

First of all, today, less than a week before the Super Bowl, I couldn't find the start time for the game anywhere on the home page. It's the biggest thing happening in the NFL and nowhere on the home page does it say when the game is being played. Nope, nowhere. That doesn't make sense. Either they're clueless, and nobody thought to put the game time on the site (which is unlikely), or their arrogant and assume that the game time is something EVERYONE must know and there's no reason to put it on the web site.

Something else interesting was the advertisement at the top of the site's home page – shown in the following figure. Help me understand something – why does the NFL need to sell advertisements on their home page? The site is likely hugely popular and they get a gazillion dollars from their licensed products, why would they need advertisements? It makes no sense – they're a huge brand and can stand alone on their brand. Why would they possibly need ad revenue? Are things that tough at the NFL?

One of the things that bothers me is that on sports related sites, when you see a game time posted, in most cases, it's the start of the television Pregame activities, not the actual game time shown. I was planning on watching the Women's World Cup Final last year and was an hour off because of this – I dutifully sat down in front of the TV at the specified time only to find out that the game started an hour later. I had a plane to catch, so I ended up watching the whole game from a bar at the airport.

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