Have any of you British saddo'ers tried to like American football?

[Beanz]

@TitoFan that is an amazingly restrained and adult response to a very flippant post from myself. To be honest I have never been able to get past about 15 minutes of a game. I don't even really watch Premiership football on TV much, I much prefer going to watch my own cities team live. Therein for me lies the rub, I have no dog in the fight and so it's hard to be interested. I will occasionally watch the Rugby if England are playing the Aussies etc and for me it is a much more fluid and improvisational game to watch. Play is much more spontaneous with individuals running the virtual length of the pitch to score trys. College football seems to rehearsed and mechanical, defensive and without wanting to be offensive a bit dumb to the outsider.

[TitoFan]

@TitoFan that is an amazingly restrained and adult response to a very flippant post from myself. To be honest I have never been able to get past about 15 minutes of a game. I don't even really watch Premiership football on TV much, I much prefer going to watch my own cities team live. Therein for me lies the rub, I have no dog in the fight and so it's hard to be interested. I will occasionally watch the Rugby if England are playing the Aussies etc and for me it is a much more fluid and improvisational game to watch. Play is much more spontaneous with individuals running the virtual length of the pitch to score trys. College football seems to rehearsed and mechanical, defensive and without wanting to be offensive a bit dumb to the outsider.

@Greenbeanz, I guess a big part of it is not having a "dog in the fight", as you put it. I don't live in the U.S., and thus do not share that bond people have in football cities, where they paint their faces in the team's colors, and crowd the stadiums dressed in all sorts of strange and colorful garb. They have their famous tailgate parties and generally have all kinds of fun at the stadium. I've only ever been to one NFL game live, and that was when I went to visit a brother-in-law in Jacksonville a couple of years ago.

Another big part of it is what you grew up with. I was introduced to American football at a fairly young age, and even got the chance to play in high school and one year at the college level. Something about the game truly appeals to me, even though like I said before, there are gaps in the action. It depends what you compare it to. We usually compare it to baseball, where of course there's no comparison as far as the flow of the game. Baseball is much, much slower. And yet it also has an appeal to many people. I personally cannot bring myself to watch a whole baseball game, unless it's the World Series or the World Baseball Classic. And yet I'll sit there and watch a whole game of Little League baseball, because I find the skill of these 12-year olds to be fascinating.

Association football, admittedly, is something I've learned to like in the last 10 years or so. The lack of scoring used to be an obstacle to me... but thanks to some buddies of mine, I've learned to appreciate the finer points of the game. As in any sport, international competitions add some spice to the pot for me... so I started just watching the World Cup. Now I'll catch the occasional Premiership game, or games from La Liga, which they sometimes televise here. But at this point I still prefer to watch international competitions.