Casual Friday: How have your football viewing habits evolved?

I could be wrong here, but there’s a good chance that most of you who come to Field Gulls are fans of gridiron football. I’ve yet to do the market research on this but I’m pretty comfortable with my hypothesis.

For today’s Casual Friday — our penultimate one before the Seattle Seahawks’ first scrimmage — let’s talk about what our football viewing habits are like!

I’m an NFL junkie and there’s really no shame in admitting that. I’ll watch RedZone, I’ll watch the regional coverage 10 AM and 1 PM games, virtually every national TV game, and I’ve not missed a Seahawks game live since the 2012 blowout of the Buffalo Bills. That has been my way of life for a really damn long time.

But there are two things that have considerably changed for me as I’ve gotten older:

1.) I don’t watch as much college football anymore. The games take incredibly long and my morning to night absorption of the sport is just not there these days. When I lived on the East Coast the dropoff was noticeable because Pac-12 games were running into 1 AM and I’m not here for that. I just don’t have the passion or energy to be hyped about college football even though we finally have a playoff. It also doesn’t help that most of my Saturday evenings are now taken up by UFC and/or boxing coverage. I’ll watch the big games like Alabama-LSU and Texas-Oklahoma but my attention span can’t hold up when the first half takes nine hours to complete.

2.) I’ve stopped watching the pre-game and highlights shows on television. One of the best things about the advancement of the internet — namely sportswriting, video sharing, and social media — is that it has completely rendered pre-game shows and the highlights programs on television useless. I mean, there are like nineteen analysts on Sunday NFL Countdown alone! The peak of NFL highlights shows on TV were ESPN NFL Primetime with Chris Berman and Tom Jackson, and Inside the NFL on HBO.

I watch games at home either on television or on my computer monitor — never on my phone because I just don’t like watching video on phones. It’s been more than 15 years since I’ve watched the Super Bowl at someone else’s house, and that was the year that Janet Jackson made America freak out with the wardrobe malfunction... which I missed because I was in the bathroom. Those hot wings can really get to you.

So go for it. How much football do you consume — NFL or otherwise — and where do you watch games?