The 4-hour NFL fan

How to care about sports without spending all your time watching TV.

There are two aspects of my personality that fight each other. Aspect 1 is the portion of me that wants to be productive at all hours of the day; to always be making progress in my goals, and to allocate as much time to this as I can.

Aspect 2, on the other hand, is a sports fan. In the context of my life, sports haven’t aged well. After watching a game on television, I don’t feel fulfilled the way I do when I check an item off its checklist. Though I do feel something else, which is also desirable. I’m not the right person to argue “being a sports fan is good” here, at least in this article. After all, it would be difficult to explain sports fandom to an extra terrestrial.

What I will say is this: it’s pseudo religious. You root for a team because you grew up rooting for a team. When the team is bad, that stinks, because you're stuck with them. But the “being stuck” part is critical to this equation; that’s part of the allure.

So, I’ve made my peace with devoting a portion of my life force to “staring at a TV while desiring that the uniforms I grew up rooting for have more points than the uniforms I grew up rooting against.” However, we need limits on this.

For that reason, I made a subconscious (or maybe direct, I don’t remember) decision to pare down my sports-watching diet; to only follow the one sport I liked best, the National Football League.

“At least”, I reasoned, “the football season is only a third of the year”. My favorite team only has 17 games a year. As a middle ground, I do think “only pro football” fits the bill. (“Only college football” works too.)

I mostly stay true to this, albeit with a small yearly exception for March Madness, and an every-four-years exception for the World Cup.

Self-contained though it is, it’s still a big sacrifice when it comes to time. Not only do I have a favorite team, I also follow (the storylines of) all 32 teams. I listen to NFL podcasts. Regarding the games themselves, there’s Thursday, Sunday, and Monday night football (3.5 hours each per week), and then of course NFL Sunday (7 hours a week). Combined, that’s 17.5 hours a week.

In the before times, I didn’t usually watch this much football, though 10 hours wasn’t unusual. Looking at it soberly, giving up 10 hours a week, 17 weeks a year, is a major thing. I’m not even counting the playoffs in those calculations.

So let’s cut to the chase. I’m going to present some techniques that have enabled me to have it all. To be a part of the conversation without sacrificing too too much.

[Beginner] Limit your investment

Starting off here, I’ve often sought to reduce the overall amount of time and mental energy spent on something that supposed to be a fun past time.

Watching all the games of my favorite team is one thing. Watching all the games of every team… now that’s a “sometimes food”, usually only at the start of the season. I can’t do it regularly, even with the techniques outlined later in this article.

I tried fantasy football for a couple years, and it had some fun elements to it, but one of the major drawbacks is the time investment. I would be on a walk, or doing some other mundane activity, and I’d start strategizing about my fantasy team. I don’t like insidiously “always on” hobbies like that. I like hobbies that I can pick up and put down, and fantasy just wasn’t that.

I have a couple of NFL football podcasts I enjoy. One is more comedy-focused, and one is more Xs-and-Os analysis. At one time, I probably had 6 or 7, for which I’d listen to every darn episode. (Playing fantasy made this even worse.) So mostly, I just do the two, now. There are too many other interests that I shouldn’t neglect.

These are more meta-level things, let’s move on to more tactical time-saving techniques:

[Intermediate] Start the game late, with a DVR

When the Lions made the playoffs in 2011, I asked a friend if I could watch it at his apartment. He told me yes, but that he wanted to start watching the game late, intentionally. I wasn’t super familiar with DVRs back then, but agreed to his offer. I think that was probably my first time watching games that way, and it definitely worked.

Obvious though it may be, this should still be stated: commercials are the enemy. I could go on many rants about advertisements on NFL games, but instead I’ll describe them with a single word: repetitive.

Fast forward to early 2018 and, on a whim, I signed up for YouTube TV. The selling point was something called “Cloud DVR” – basically unlimited recordings, and seamless switching from live to delay. This became the main way I’d watch games. Before long, I found myself intentionally making my stream 5 to 30 minutes behind the real broadcast.

Regarding this “delayed on purpose” concept, I have a couple big picture things to say.

Firstly, you'll need to get used to being a little offset from the actual live happenings. The truth of the matter is that there’s already a slight delay when watching a “live” event on television. Putting that “well actually” aside though, this technique can lead to getting spoiled by friends’ text messages, or absent-mindedly refreshing social media.

It’s less than ideal, but what you lose in this spoilage potential is massively outweighed by “you don’t have to watch ads.” No ads. Did I mention no ads?

Secondly, beyond just ads, sometimes I want to skip the in-between-plays stuff. The “skip 15 seconds forward” button on the YouTube TV app can be really good at this specifically for American football. I’ll see a player starting to get tackled, I can tell the play is about to be blown dead, and I’ll just skip forward (usually twice) at this point. They’ll already be lining up for the next play. Yes, this is all very A.D.D., but I’ll remind you that the goal of all this hubbub is saving our precious time.

Injuries and penalties, while sometimes intriguing, usually induce boredom. It’s nice to be able to skip right through those.

This is all leading into the next hack:

[Hard] Wait until 30 minutes after the broadcast, then watch condensed mode

In 2014, I got a free trial of “NFL Game Rewind”, a service which lets you watch entire games after they aired. I liked being able to watch random out-of-market games. Back in those days, you needed DirectV to get every game live, and I definitely wasn’t about to start paying for that.

Roughly around 2016, the service (now named “NFL GamePass”) introduced “condensed mode.” If you click this option, you’ll see an edited broadcast, with only the actual plays, reducing the normal 3.5 hours to 40 minutes. What an idea!

This takes some getting used to, but it’s so much more time efficient, and the increased density means you’re glued to your seat the whole time. I love the feeling of listening to a podcast the day after a game, and the hosts are talking about that same game… which they clearly watched the long way. Whereas for yours truly, I only donated 40 minutes of my life, but I still know every reference. In short, it 100% feels like you “watched” the game.

At first I did this for other, tangential games – not for my primary rooting interests. A few years later, I began experimenting with new ideas. I decided to deliberately not look up the score of a given game until after it concluded, and then watch the condensed broadcast blind. Later, I even did this for the games I cared most about.

Some weeks in 2020, I watched an entire regular season week (all 16 games!) this way. (To be fair, I was located in Singapore back then, where the games start at 2am local time.)

How did all this stuff work? Amazingly. To be completely caught up on everything, and to be able to hold a conversation about every team, but not needing to spend an entire weekend watching television, felt like an insane hack.

The NFL’s service for this keeps changing names, and these days it’s “NFL+”. I think the NFL is aware of people like me, because they’ve added features to help me. For one, they offer a feature to blur the scores of all games. I love that they added that. Truly, hats off. I’m saluting, bowing, and sobbing. A+ feature.

Sans features like that, you have to be very vigilant about not accidentally seeing the score of a game. To this end, I set up a special wallpaper on my phone: a bright yellow image with the text “don’t look at scores or check social media”. I’ve definitely needed to be vigilant with this. It requires discipline.

Wrapping up

Did I really just write 1,500 words on the best way to feel productive while caring about pro football? I suppose I did.

Welcome to this blog, where I care about very niche things. If you’re new here, please drop me a follow. I would really appreciate that.

I’m still pondering a name change for this publication. Feel free to give suggestions in the comments. I think something with the word “productive” in it. That particular word is something of a through-line for me.

Anyhoo… see you next week.