Milne | Great Scot! Football is too slow

Now I understand why there are so many commercial breaks on American television. Football is boring.

That comment probably gives away that I’m not from around here. I’m an exchange student from the University of St Andrews, Scotland, and one of my goals for this year is to learn a thing or two about American sports.

While I have vague recollections of seeing a couple of NFL games on an obscure sports program many, many years ago, we simply don’t watch “American” football in Scotland. Or baseball. Or basketball. Or hockey (we’re more into curling).

While I haven’t yet observed a basketball or hockey game, I’m willing to give them a try. But so far I’m not at all impressed by the two most beloved sports in The Land of the Free.

I was one of the few people who turned up to watch the Penn football team beat Bucknell at Franklin Field Saturday afternoon, my first live match and the first time I’ve seen a football game from start to finish. I understood why Americans took care to assure me it wasn’t a particularly enthralling contest; there were no scores in the second and third quarters while it took the Bison until the fourth to erase the big fat zero on their side of the scoreboard.

Maybe I would hold a more favorable opinion of the sport if I had attended one of the other Ivy League matches Saturday; there were 45 points scored in both Columbia vs. Lafayette and Dartmouth vs. Yale. Sure, the Quakers made a couple of skillful plays this past Saturday that made me, a foreigner, call out, “Nice!”

In fairness, Bucknell had a few chances at a touchdown that were spoiled by incomplete long passes, but most of the time my thoughts were, “There’s not much going on here.”

That’s my main problem with football.

Why don’t Americans watch rugby instead?

What makes rugby inherently more interesting than football, in my view, is that there’s not so much standing around.

Granted, the clock stops for injuries and the ball must go out of play before the referee can bring the half to an end, but by and large you’ll see 80 minutes of game time and can reasonably predict when you’ll get home afterwards.

Contrast this with football, where the clock stops every time a player is tackled (in rugby play continues unless a foul or error is committed), resulting in a mere 60 minutes of play being dragged out for three or more hours.

I find that simply too long. I wouldn’t mind if the match lasted one hour plus a halftime break, but the constant stop-start play leads to too much downtime.

I guess I’ve been unlucky in terms of the games I’ve been to (my one experience of live baseball was the Phillies’ 4-0 loss to the Giants — even duller than the football game). However, if Americans want Brits to come to this country and not get up early in the morning to watch English Premier League soccer, they need to make their sports events more interesting or at least much shorter.

Having said all that I heartily approve the concept of cheerleaders.

Stuart Milne is a junior international relations major and an exchange student from the University St Andrews, Scotland. He can be contacted at dpsports@dailypennsylvanian.com.

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