Florida Footy Fan
Debutant
It didn't always used to be that way up here. You'd have pre-game NFL shows every Sunday on the networks that showed football, but that'd generally be it. No postgame, even, just a few thoughts from the commentators after the game — might have been over in a matter of 15 minutes, and that's on the long side. CBS still doesn't have a postgame show, actually, and Fox only has one when they have the doubleheader, only so they can take their football coverage up to 8 p.m. on the east coast (if it runs late, they just go right to regular programming).
Things started to change, in my opinion, when the major leagues moved their broadcasts to dedicated cable sports networks. When MLB games were on local stations, for example, there was no pregame to speak of. It was live at the top of the hour for a brief intro and first pitch at five minutes past. That's why games start at 7:05, for example — it was the only way to set anything up at all, like who was the starting pitcher. (I figure they keep the "tradition" for the sake of the extra commercials they can squeeze in, even in spite of the half-hour pregame.) Now that they have networks that are more or less dedicated to the team (the off-hour programming on the Florida networks is traaaaaaaaaaaaaasssssssssssshhhhhhh), they have all the time in the world to do these studio shows.
I don't mind them, though. They can be interesting at times, and it's not exactly taking up airtime on a network that'd be showing something quality otherwise. The postgame shows tend to be more interesting than pregames, though.
But the advertising is getting out of hand up here in some sports. In the NHL, after an icing, NBC has been double-boxing with a 15-second commercial because they can't go to commercial after icings (the idea is to penalize the team who iced the puck; you keep the same line out there, you can't call timeout; TV can't go to break). That's bad, but at least there's no play going on, unlike in the NBA, which will do the same thing during free throws.
So you shouldn't fear the American-style pre and post-game shows as much as you should fear the networks trying to squeeze in ads where they don't belong, because it's jarring as hell, even when you know it's coming. I've heard Seven does it on AFL, but since I watch through WatchAFL, I get the Fox Footy feed, which I guess is cleaned up. Not sure how that works, tbh.
The live play number seems to get less and less every time I hear it, even though the game seems to remain the same. IDK, part of the core of American football is that downtime between plays that allows for teams to strategize their next move. Gridiron is just a completely different game. I'd compare it more to baseball in that sense than I would any other code of football.
So that brings me to the next thing: NFL Red Zone has completely changed the way a lot of us watch football up here. It's whip-around coverage (without commercials) from across the NFL. Its mission is to cut to games that are literally in the red zone, though in the late-afternoon window, it'll usually just stick with alternating between games depending on the situation, since there are fewer games, and thus fewer chances for red zone opportunities. Theoretically, if someone could just subscribe to that (I'm not sure if you can, I just get it through my cable), they'd be able to follow all 32 teams pretty well. It's a miracle of broadcasting, in my opinion. (Which makes you wonder how the NFL has screwed everything else up on that front so badly, right?)
