McNutt wrote: ↑Mon Feb 14, 2022 12:17 am
Zaxxon wrote:Octavious wrote: ↑Sun Feb 13, 2022 11:08 pm
I really should get back into hockey. I used to freaking love it and stopped watching after they had the strike and never went back. By far the best sport to see in person.
Or on TV.
Hockey is the best live sport, but football is the best TV sport. For me at least.
I think football is one of the worst TV sports because you virtually never see enough in one shot. They're either showing you the QB scanning the field, but not what he's looking at, or the receivers down the field, but not what's happening with the QB. It's an entirely different viewing experience in person. Moving aspect ratios from 4:3 to 16:9 helped, but not nearly enough.
This is the case in hockey, as well, but not to the same extent, IMO.
Then there's the structural issues with football and basketball, where the ends of halves/games slow to a crawl if the game is at all close, and challenges happen often even with a very slim chance of winning them. Less noticeable in person when there's stadium entertainment happening, but drives me nuts on TV. Give me hockey's increase in tension near the end of close contests, with goalies being pulled, very limited timeouts, and failed challenges costing in-game penalty minutes rather than a measly one-of-many timeouts.
I'd argue that if hockey's not the best TV sport, maybe it's baseball--the whole field is at least shown frequently during plays. I have trouble with baseball's snail pace when not viewing in person, though.
The Meal wrote: ↑Mon Feb 14, 2022 6:45 am
I'm as big of a hockey fan as there is. There's no question it loses a fair amount in the televised product. Higher resolution broadcasting helps, but the angles used end up throwing away a decent amount of context for the game. Good announcers can help bring that back some, but across the league the quality of broadcast pairs has a wide range of quality.
Agree. I think this is even more of an issue with football, though.
Hockey's biggest issue is there's a lot of institutional knowledge that isn't inherently obvious to new fans. It'd be a lot like me tuning into a random cricket match. I wouldn't expect the announcers to explain everything to me like it was my first game (though it would be). There's a lot of beauty in hockey for what it is, but a new fan would suffer greatly for not knowing a lot of the whys behind how things are playing out.
Also agreed, but this is a massive issue with football, as well.
Bottom line for me is every sport loses something when viewing on TV, but I think football loses more than most.
