So, on to my comment - I agree with a lot of what you have to say, but will always prefer to watch football over baseball for the exact reasons you outlined - football is easy to follow, and it doesn’t take a huge commitment.

I’m a casual sports fan who enjoys killing the occasional Sunday watching football, or Thursday night after work to taking in a Bruins game… and I like having the ability to make sports small talk at a bar, or an the elevator or conference room, when the conversation has died. I also like having something more interesting than online poker to gamble on. In fact, if it weren’t for gambling, the only football I’d watch every week would be the Patriots - and even then, the games are often blowouts, making them very boring and not worth watching past halftime (especially this season).

While not considering myself a “die hard” fan of any sport or team (maybe a “die somewhat-hard-but-not-too-hard” fan of the Bruins), I use sports as an excuse to travel to other cities and to rub Boston’s sports dominance in the very faces of the teams we are dominating. But in this case is more of a “pride in my city” than a “pride in my team issue”. I’ve enjoyed going to the sports bars in the Miami area with a Pats jersey on, and have gone to Seattle with a Tek t-shirt hung proudly on my back. The looks from the locals are priceless, and it makes me proud of my city.

(Note, however, that at the last Pats game I saw in Miami was in ’06 and the Dolphins beat us 21-0, and the only time I was in Seattle to watch the Sox, we lost the series 2 games to 1. So much for rubbing it in…)

Gambling, though, adds a LOT of interest to otherwise boring sports or competitions. Even to baseball, which in my opinion is nothing but a bunch of egregiously overpaid men standing around for a few hours in funny looking pants and baggy shirts waiting for their few times at bat - at which point if they can manage a hit once every three times at bat their at the top of their sport. If Brady only made a pass completion 1 out of every 3 passes, he’d be one of the worst in his position.

Other than the pitcher (who works what, once every 5 games) and the catcher, who by far is the only player who really “works” the full game, baseball is the only professional team sport where standing constitutes 95% of your time while playing the sport. Live games, however, are a lot of fun because you can get drunk and spend the time between homeruns trying to flag down the hotdog guy.

My other big problem with baseball is that it’s the only professional sport (I’m talking the top 4 or baseball, hockey, football and basketball…heck, even soccer) that the defense can do absolutely nothing to put points (aka goals, runs, baskets) on the board. Without the ability to have turnovers, it makes it so that the game of baseball, which is already relatively slow, has very little chance of a sudden burst of excitement (barring a home run or double play). I continually hear that baseball is the sport involving the most amount of strategy - but if I wanted to spend my personal time “thinking” I’d rather save my ever decreasing brain matter for something like bettering myself (studying, investing, etc.) than filling up my valuable brain power with baseball stats and historical figures. Football, comparatively, has almost no stats. There are so few games it’s pointless to make any comparisons to prior games, let alone prior seasons! I like not thinking on Sundays, and taking each game week to week. Otherwise if I threw myself into baseball I’d spend my free time looking up ERA’s and RBI’s and crap like that which still, to this day, make no sense to me.

You were always more cognitive than I was, though, which no doubt explains our disparate thoughts relating to sports… In short- I’m lazy, don’t want to really “think” too much about anything outside of investing, and can’t make the commitment required to be a real baseball fan. I’ll prefer to stick to being a fair weather Sox fan, and cheering for them only after they win the ALDS.

Two final things relating to your other points about football - the running down of the clock IS extremely boring, and 9 times out of 10 costs me a winning bet (either on the spread or on the over), but it HAS to be done, because football does allow the possibility of a turnover. The best way to think about it would be offering the baseball team with the fewer runs that game another chance at an “at bat” if they can strike out the team with the higher score quick enough to get another chance. It’s not in the winning team’s interest to risk it, so who can blame them? And if they do “go for it” and score again, they get berated in the press like our poor Patriots have been lately for “running up the score”. It’s a no win, so why bother risking it?

And to you second point, regarding sudden death OT of the NFL - I couldn’t agree more. I much prefer the way college football does it, where each team gets a chance to score, and it keeps going until one team scores more than the other. Often times in college FB, kicking a field goal in OT means you lost the game. It’s much more even, and makes overtime a LOT more exciting. It also helps a lot when you bet the over and want a high scoring game.

So keep up the posts, man. I’ll be reading more going forward!