If, like me, you do not have one favorite NFL team and would rather consume the blessed entirety of an NFL Sunday over a seven-hour span, then you know that the NFL RedZone channel is pretty much the greatest thing ever. The pay-per-view service, available in one version on DirecTV and another via cable providers, cuts out all the nonsense like timeouts, halftimes, meaningless possessions and most punts (you didn’t see a lot of the 49ers’ and Rams’ offenses on RedZone this past season, which is a good thing).
Oh, and there aren’t any commercials. In fact, on the cable version of RedZone (the one so ably hosted by the NFL Network’s Scott Hanson), the mere hint of a commercial seems to set off all sorts of panic, as if one millisecond of Peyton Manning shilling for Papa John’s would bring the whole operation grinding to a halt.
In case you need further convincing about RedZone’s greatness, the folks over at SportFacts crunched the numbers to find out just how much commercial time we (don’t) miss while watching RedZone. The answer, based on their finding that the average NFL game has between 60 and 65 minutes of commercials: 35 hours of commercials over the course of the regular season.
Facing a decline in TV ratings during the regular season, an NFL executive told a convention of broadcasters in November that the league is looking at ways to speed up games, perhaps by tinkering with commercial breaks. Last week, Baltimore Ravens owner Steve Bisciotti said that needs to happen.
“It doesn’t take a genius to figure out that nobody wants to see two minutes of commercials, come back, kick the ball and then go to a minute-and-a-half of commercials,” he told the Baltimore Sun. “I’ve thought that was absurd since I was 20 years old.”
So just watch RedZone. Problem solved.
(c) 2017, The Washington Post ยท Matt Bonesteel / Featured Image via NFL
