1) Agreed, along with a huge swathe of fatherless players whose only model for self-esteem is making fools of themselves on television. After X number of games and Y number of highlights you might think they would get over these juvenile antics but when they have no frame of reference they carry on.
2) Under Rozelle & Tagliabue, video games imitated football. Under Goodell, that formula is reversed. Combine this with the cancer that is fantasy football and the game has been subsumed by peripheral concerns.
3) Player movement. Good player? Good team? Championship? Expect a cash-in and a fire sale and a load of new faces you don’t care about on the team next year. The NFL, the owners and the NFLPA pat themselves on the back about their collective bargaining agreement but the constant shuffle of talent means, as one writer once said, you are ‘rooting for laundry.’
4) Commercials and interruptions. I watched a Super Bowl from the 70s recently. Each commercial break was 30 seconds (!).
Closer to the modern era, the Super Bowl was notable for the increased frequency and length of its ad breaks. That formula long ago afflicted the regular season with breaks of at least 1.5 min, often closer to 2 or 3. There is the ridiculous (as even the broadcasters admit) sequence of touchdown-commercial-kickoff-commercial.
We keep hearing that NFL games are highly-rated compared to other programming and that sports are somewhat protected against ratings attrition due to time-shifting ie people watching the game later or only bits and pieces. But is this really true in the age of cord-cutting, narrowcasting and people lost in their fog of digital devices?
If Netflix and Amazon video binge-watching is the new standard in television due in large part to the audience’s exasperation with 1 hr shows actually containing only 41 min of content (ie 1/3 ads), leagues and rightsholders are living in a fool’s paradise if they think the 2016-vintage viewer will abandon those objections for a football game. At best, the mute button is engaged during breaks. At worst, the users are flipping around the channels or kicking on the DVR to watch recorded programming - and they just might find something they prefer to watch there, thus abandoning the game.
5) People simply don’t have the money to watch in this ‘thriving’ Obama economy. No cable, no dish, no TV. Many of them sure as hell don’t have the money for financial products, vehicles or upscale purchases advertised, which means even when they are watching the ad buys are futile.
You forgot:
6) The league takes a whizz on your many years of loyal support and fandom to extort billions of dollars from some local government to move your team to their city (i.e. the Rams).
What if Trump takes office and calls for a super bowl boycott? Lady gaga doesn’t do it for me. Her figure is like the laughable Miss Universe. You folks have struck a raw nerve.