Random Redditor asks: I hope this isn’t a stupid question. I genuinely want to understand this. Are people that are getting older 40+ losing interest in the NFL? I feel like I am, just wondering if there’s others out there that feel that way?
TL;DR: Yes, gameplay is too diluted by stoppages.
It is not that I am getting older inasmuch as the games feeling more tedious. A few seconds of game play is sandwiched between a minute or more of stoppages. There are more and louder commercials. In some games, there seem to be a lot of penalties. Replays take a long time to resolve.
There are a lot of injuries, something that’s very evident when playing fantasy football, a game solely based on players’ statistics. (Running backs, especially, have the worst of it.) And don’t get me started on the “two-minute drill.” That period before the end of half or end of game can take up to a half hour to resolve.
As a contrast, the rugby 7s in the Olympics is more action-oriented – a player gets tackled and tries to pass back it to a teammate to advance. Without knowing much about the sport or the teams, I found rugby 7s exciting.
A secondary problem with the NFL is the games are spread out among too many places: NBC/Peacock, CBS/Paramount+, ABC, Fox, ESPN, Amazon Prime Video. While there is an NFL subscription, it doesn’t allow watching local games except on replay, apparently.