I wasn’t that excited for the Super Bowl this year – not having ready access to NFL games, or college football games for that matter, I just don’t follow the season as closely as I used to. But I bought a few spots in one of those pools where you win money based on the score at the end of each quarter, etc., so I thought I’d get up early (it started at 6:25am here) and watch it.

I got up and got it going online, but after a few minutes I realized I was basically just bored and didn’t care and turned it off and went back to bed. I’m glad the Saints won – just because when I was a kid they were always the NFL’s perennial doormat, and I’m happy to see something good happen for New Orleans. But other than that, just not that interesting for me.

I suppose some people watch the Super Bowl for the commercials – but now you can get on the internet and watch all of them immediately as soon as they’ve aired: http://www.youtube.com/adblitz I watched a few later today and although a few were somewhat funny, overall I wasn’t that impressed with the commercials either.

So I started thinking today about the amount of time I devote to reading about sports. Much more about college football than about the NFL, to be sure, but overall just a lot of time about sports in general. And I realized that I am actually more interested in is the stuff going on in the background than I am in the actual games – recruiting, coaching hires, the draft, etc. But when it comes to the games themselves, I usually get bored pretty quickly unless it’s a really compelling game.

And it doesn’t help that there was an article in the Wall Street Journal recently analyzing the number of minutes of actual gameplay in an average NFL game: An average game lasts about 185 minutes. But only 10 minutes and 47 seconds out of a game are actual gameplay. That means that 174 minutes are spent on commercials, timeouts, shots of players standing around on the sidelines or running on or off of the field, etc. That blows my mind – only 11 minutes out of a 3 hour and 5 minute game involves actual gameplay.

Anyway, so what, right? Well, I spend the most of my nonproductive time reading about technology, politics, and sports – in that order and with sports coming up a distant third. But I am going to stop reading about sports – I’ve deleted all sports RSS feeds, browser bookmarks, etc. I’m sure I’ll still hear about major stories in sports inadvertently, but I’m going to try to cut out the time I spend on sports, give up watching the games from Vietnam, etc.

The real challenge will be not filling up that time with just more time reading about technology and politics. Maybe one day I can even cut out the politics – but that will be a lot more difficult for me than the sports.