Commercials II

Now that we're into March Madness, lets talk about commercials in basketball. The worst part of basketball is all the down times. In the NBA, each team gets seven time outs. Also, refs can stop the game for them to review a play. Plus there are what they call television timeouts to sell even more stuff.

I've been to enough NBA games to see people start leaving the arena in the fourth quarter. OK if your team is behind by 20 points, but it happens if its a close game, too. They want to beat the traffic and they know there are going to be a ton of timeouts. I've watched games on TV that are in the fourth quarter until someone calls a timeout. Close or not, I usually change the channel then. I might or might not go back at some point.

I saw an article that talked about a game that had 21.7 seconds left. It finished twenty minutes later. There were 8 fouls, 19 free throws, and I don't know how many but I'm guessing a ton of timeouts. Its all easily fixable, but fewer commercials would mean less money for the league and they probably wouldn't put up with that. What do less commercials matter if people aren't watching them?

I chose to talk about this instead of March Madness directly. It goes on for about 3 weeks and the team I picked to win it all, Kentucky, was eliminated on the first day. Aaarg!