The NFL is not a sport. It’s a clock-chewing ad machine.

A few years ago I tried to calculate the huge amount of time that’s wasted watching the NFL, mostly as a way of trying to get myself to stop watching so much.

Your typical week during the regular season has five gaming periods. Sunday afternoons, Sunday evenings, Sunday night, Monday night, and Thursday night. Each game lasts about three hours. That’s 15 hours of football just watching the games.

Then you’ve got all the pre-game discussion and post-game “analysis” on channels like ESPN and others.

What exactly is there to analyse about a football game, anyway? The other team scored more points so they wound up winning. OMG, really?

You’ve got all the prep that goes into watching a game. Barbecuing and cookouts. Inviting friends and family over. Boozing and whatnot. If you’re attending a game in person, it becomes practically a whole day between tailgating, the event itself, and fighting traffic afterward.

Then you’ve got all the extracurricular stuff. Fantasy football, which apparently involves a lot of agonizing over assembling a make-believe team of players or something. Online betting. Console gaming. Memorabilia collecting.

Then there’s the endless discussions about all the aforementioned. Have you ever been sucked into a conversation about someone’s fantasy football picks? It’s maddening. Ever gotten into an argument over football history or a team’s or player’s future prospects? You’d think you were stepping on someone’s religion the way some have reacted.

You add up all the time spent on the NFL and I bet it would come out to thirty or more hours PER WEEK during the season. That’s like having an unpaid second job. It’s like being an intern for the NFL. If you devoted 30 hours a week to virtually anything remotely productive or worthwhile, you’d master the habit in a few months. You could learn to code, edit videos, write scintillating Medium articles, write a novel, rebuild a motor, earn a black belt in karate, or even just get jacked at the gym.

You want to know how the Egyptians built the pyramids? They didn’t have the NFL around then to wastes everyone’s time. It was either stare at the desert all day or build the world’s largest Lego project.

Look, I enjoy a game here and there. I love my Philadelphia Eagles. I’ve been a fan since birth. But the NFL has become too much of a “culture” and a time suck for everyone.

You’re not even really watching football so much as you are watching commercials and ads. I really don’t need State Farm Insurance or Domino’s Pizza in my life that much.

It’s time to call timeout on football and get our lives back.