It's been two years since ESPN America showed up on local cable. It's been a lot of fun: March Madness, the Stanley Cup Finals and the Scripps National Spelling Bee, all piped directly into my French home. Quel bonheur!

But the biggest impact has undoubtedly been college and professional football, the game I grew up watching with deep loyalty, a game whose evolution I followed as a matter of course as I grew up and wandered about the country. Football served as a sort of common denominator, something that I could find someone to talk to about no matter where I was: even as a PhD student in an obscure and intellectually involved field, there we were, talking point spreads and QB ratings in the seminar room on Friday afternoons.

Then I moved to France and it all disappeared, reduced to crappy Internet feeds at odd hours and checking scores at ESPN.com. C'est la vie, right?

After two years back in the game, however, I've got some serious questions about my old favorite pastime.

Do you people have any idea how much of your time this is eating?

Football games have always been excruciatingly long: the average length of an NFL broadcast hasn't been under three hours since 1978. Difference being, however, that in 1978 there were only three NFL time slots in a given week; today there are at least four and, with the occasional double-dip Monday night and the NFL Network money grab Thursday night gig thrown in, as many as six. That's something like 19 hours! I've had jobs that took less of my time each week.

And then there's college football. Growing out of the "Game of the Week" broadcast every fall Saturday afternoon since the 1960s, there can now be as many as ten different college football time slots in a week, including not only morning-til-night coverage on Saturday but many weeknight games played by lesser-known programs searching for national television exposure. Add to that the increase in length of the college season from nine games plus a handful of bowls on or around New Years Day to 12 games plus conference championships plus 35 freaking bowl games—ridiculousness of said arrangement driven home by the 2012 UCLA squad, who just finished its season 6-8 after a loss to 7-6 Illinois in a bowl featuring two already-fired head coaches—and you've got nonstop televised football that could, in the wrong hands, be worse than a cocaine addiction.

footsoc2.jpgLigue 1 soccer, on the other hand, seems intent on keeping marriages intact: there are no games on network television and just one per week on regular cable. You've got to buy a special package to get more than that, and even then the games are often on at the same time.

Does anybody even care who wins NFL games anymore?

OK so that's an exaggeration, but let's look at what drives the overwhelming popularity of the NFL in 2012. Vegas processes over one billion USD on NFL games each year, and bets placed illegally by American football fans hover, depending on the analyst, around 10 billion. That's two billion more than the NFL's own formidable revenue stream! While the league puts on its best anti-gambling face, it knows full well that point spreads are the reason many people watch, and that the only reason why anyone watches a three-touchdown laugher is to see whether or not the losing team can eek out a touchdown in garbage time and cover the spread.

Although the Internet has certainly propagated sports gambling, it's always been around; what is relatively new, however, is the other non-result-oriented NFL hobby, something its college counterpart can never touch: fantasy football. What started out as an embarrassing poker-room activity for frustrated nerds that was openly ignored by television producers has become in some ways the raison d'être of the modern NFL broadcast. Otherwise-meaningless stats crawl inexorably along the bottom of the screen, filling the dead time between plays better than any '72 Dolphins retrospective ever could. Halftime shows say more about players than teams, giving game-by-game fantasy results as fantasy category leaders scroll across the bottom of the screen.

What's more, the NFL doesn't have to do its Janus impression while reaping the financial windfall that comes with fantasy football mania: it openly embraces it, even to the point of directing its franchises to post fantasy-relevant statistics on NFL scoreboards and doing sponsorship deals with mobile-phone companies built around the dissemination of fantasy results.

Never mind the fact that most fantasy teams are "purchased" with payouts to the winners and thus involve gambling; somehow, fantasy has been able to play the March Madness card and pass largely unnoticed by the anti-gambling powers-that-be. Seriously, can you imagine the uproar if Fox started broadcasting "spread-relevant" information and showing highlights of meaningless games because the spread outcome was in question? Somehow, a boost in ratings based on the fact that millions of people want to know whether LeGarrette Blount scores late in the fourth quarter to cut the Falcon's lead to 28 and win (or lose) a fantasy matchup doesn't press the same MOB (Moral Outrage Button) as spread gambling.

What exactly are we watching here, anyway?

I mean that in the most literal sense possible: what appears on the screen during an NFL broadcast? Never mind the tired-but-true bit about there being almost no live action in an NFL broadcast (about 11 minutes, on average): that's not news and, nauseating though their over-produced interludes may be, the networks have found ways to fill the time. I mean what do we see of the game itself?

This is the great irony of football, the single greatest sports broadcasting achievement in human history: beneath it all, the fact remains that, from a strategically-minded fan's point of view, it's a terrible sport to watch on TV! No matter how big your TV is, you still can't see the lion's share of what goes on strategically between two teams in one of the most complicated games on earth. That's because the TV camera only shows you the football itself and its immediate surroundings, while the true flow of the game is being exposed elsewhere. On a pass play this is obvious: the QB throws the ball and, not having seen the play develop in the secondary, a TV fan basically hopes that the pass will or will not find an open receiver; on the other hand, the success of a running play is often determined by how linebackers and defensive backs react...players that are often not visible on TV. From a strategic point of view, the only angle that allows one to follow the action is one that takes all 22 players into account. Why else would the NFL attempt to control access to sky-level camera shots, what it calls the "All-A22" view? And yet gamblers, convinced the know the game because they can define "Tampa 2" and identify a screen pass without spilling their beer, confidently plunk down money each week based on what they've seen on television. No wonder bookmaking is such a lucrative business!

The truth is that, as is the case with soccer and hockey, the only true way to appreciate football strategy is to watch in person...irony being that TV has ruined the stadium experience as well! The raft of TV timeouts that have infected any major college or professional football game push the quantity of dead time well into the intolerable zone, at least for people who aren't either really drunk and/or dressed as some sort of animal, block of cheese or magical being. That, and if you're from where I'm from it's liable to -20F.

Is it just me, or have NFL players become 1000% more whiny?

While they're definitely not yet in the league of Cristian Ronaldo and co., NFL tough guys sure do whine a lot these days. Does an incomplete pass happen anymore without the receiver popping up and doing that stupid "throw the flag" mimicry at the nearest official? Does a quarterback get himself bumped by a defensive lineman anymore without begging for a 15-yard roughing penalty? At the risk of going curmudgeon on you, Jerry Rice and Joe Montana rarely did this crap: if the NFL gets any whinier, it's going to lose one of its primary selling points vis-à-vis soccer, the NBA and other gimp-infected sporting operations.

So, in the final analysis, I should just stop watching, right? Reclaim my Sundays (and Saturdays and weekdays...), stop wasting time following football news...

...wait, hold that thought: it's wildcard weekend, and I've got to set my fantasy lineup before the games start! Cincinnati's getting four points at Houston, that looks pretty safe...and the Saints are easy money to cover against the Lions, right?

Ahhh, they just keep pulling me back in...