Slow Down Televised Sports

As I sat there watching an NFL playoff game on TV the other day, a curious idea occurred to me. Why not just watch the whole game (at least the active plays) in slow motion? After all, the action happens so quickly that often even the paid officials get fooled by events and make incorrect calls, only to be shown wrong by slo-mo replays.

Say a game begins at 2 pm. The folks at the TV network could schedule the slow-motion version at 3, giving them time to get a head start editing out time-outs and "dead" time between plays. There could still be the same amount of commercials, but the game probably wouldn't last much longer than the real-time version.

There is so much going on within a single football play, and much of it is away from the ball. I would like to be able to watch how all of the players on the field play, but the camera usually has many of them out of the picture. So, in accompaniment with the slow-motion play-by-play, I would like a wider view of the field that shows more of the action.

Slowed down broadcasting also applies to fast-moving sports like basketball and hockey, especially the latter. Hockey moves so quickly that I usually don't even know where the puck is at any given moment (which is the main reason that I don't like to watch hockey). Slowing things down would give me time to assimilate both the offensive and defensive strategies and how they are implemented. It would also, I believe, highlight the players' skills better.

I have been in public places while various games are on TV. And I have noticed that people are almost instinctively drawn to pay attention to slow-motion replays, even if they hadn't been following the game!

Of course, I could record a game myself and replay it a notch slower, speeding it up between plays and during commercials. But that sounds like too much delay and work. Besides, from the viewpoint of the network and sponsors, a slow-motion option would have to come from them in order for them to still be able to profit from the advertising.

There is already much slow-motion replaying going on anyway, at least in football where there is all this dead time between plays. So basketball and hockey, with their generally continuous play, would probably benefit the most from a totally slow-motion format.

Now to baseball and slow-motion broadcasts. It is very difficult to follow pitches when the slower ones are whizzing by at 70 mph and the fastest can exceed 100 mph. But at a slower pace, everything is revealed! Just cut out the extremely tedious dead time between pitches and overall you'd probably end up with a shorter game, even with the actual action slowed down! And the broadcasters could still insert their oh-so-sacred commercials anywhere they wanted!