3 years ago I stopped watching full length games because they were too tedious with all the stoppages for red flags, replays, booth reviews, and ticky tack fouls because a defensive player didn't politely ask the QB to fall down, and instead knocked him down for a sack.
Now I watch GamePass, the condensed version, and I can see every play and an entire game in about 40 minutes. I don't have to endure endless, agonizing parades of attempts at perfection by officials. I actually get to watch THE GAME.
The cry a few years ago by owners was that the game needed to be sped up to keep the audience interested (kind of like Golf). And what do they do? Every year they add another aspect that slows it down again because some influential HC and his owner got burned on a bad call and so the entire rule book must be changed and we need to double the amount of officials and use AI to check them.
It used to be that the rule was that officials were just part of the game. No more. Now the officials ARE the game. The NFL wants to make officiating so over reaching that the game is becoming incidental to watching the refs have meeting after meeting on the field, donning headsets, sticking their heads under hoods, flexing for the camera, and talking to some anonymous, mysterious guy hiding in a secret room in New York to determine outcomes that often defy common sense and what we can see, anyway, with our own 2 eyes.
Yuk. Just yuk.
