and I have a theory that the pace of hockey is too much for the uninitiated to follow. Football is crazy action for several seconds, but then they take about 30-40 seconds and to get the next play started. In hockey, you can have several minutes of back and forth action, changing on the fly, and the fact that the puck moves fast and is tough at times to track (for those not raised on the game), it becomes a bit too much (also the rules are a common hating point as well).

Football and Hockey are both great, with incredible precision, speed, finesse, and jaw dropping displays of skill, but perhaps the fact that Hockey is often seen as “a series of mistakes” (as Skip Bayless calls it) is the largest turn off. Mind you, I personally think the biggest problem with Hockey is the marketing and how the NHL presents itself; saturday afternoon games (go to saturday nights, networks don’t show anything of worth and no other major league sport uses that time), being on Versus (get back on ESPN, if they can find room between the poker and billiard and bowling, none of which are true, 100% real sports), and the rape and pillaging of the Canadian teams in the 1990’s (the moving of the Winnipeg Jets to Phoenix has been a massive disaster, and Colorado only had any success thanks to those low years the Nordiques had in Quebec City). They also do themselves no favours by continuing to withhold a franchise from Hamilton (southern Ontario has a massive population and not all of them are Toronto or Buffalo fans).

Anyhow, enough spouting about hockey, let’s get back to some New York Football Giants conversation!