Olympics or pre-season NFL?

Part of me feels guilty for having no desire to watch the olympics. My initial excuse was lack of time, but then I found myself with time to watch NFL preseason football. I was listening to one of the local sports stations the other day and they put up a poll asking people which sporting event they preferred to watch, the olympics or pre-season NFL football. The results at the time I heard about it was over 85% voting for pre-season football over the olympics.

So what makes the olympics so incredibly boring to watch? I think it's because you have no vested interest in the athletes or the team. The large majority of the time we are rooting for people we never even heard of until the start of the event. Sure, there's valid reason to feel compelled to root for your country's team... but when this only comes around once every 4 years and the team members are different every year, you just sort of lose any connection to the team that you may have developed during the previous olympics.

To contrast, a professional sports team maintains a consistent identity with a city for a very long time. The team owners, coaches, and players remain relatively consistent from year to year as well. Sure you get a few changes every year but the majority of the team remains in tact. Additionally, you get to see your team perform repeatedly over the course of an entire season. And when the season if over, the longest you have to wait is about 8 months (for nfl football) before the next season begins.

The other issue is that you never really know what sport your are going to get to watch when you tune in to the olympics. If I knew (without doing excessive research) when the mens open 100m and the 4x100m were going to be, I would sit down, tune in, crack a beer and watch the 10 second race. Instead, what acutally happens is that I see the olymics is on... I change to the channel, and I get two tiny sweaty guys in funny shirts in a vigorous badminton match. While I respect their passion for the sport of badminton, the world should respect my choice not to spend my time watching it.

No matter how much they ramp up the marketing efforts I really don't think the above obstacles can be overcome. I will be resigned to watching pre-season football over the summer olympics every 4 years. The only suggestion that I can give to the networks is to perhaps hire John Madden to cover a few events. It wouldn't change the sport, but I would certainly be inclined to watch Madden break down the replay of a winning curling toss.