Is football still about football?

Last week I went to my first college football game at Umass and I was shocked; shocked about the many commercials shown during this game of college students. I have never been to a college football game nor have I seen one on TV before, but what I saw last week was not what I expected. Commercials were everywhere! 

The commercials I expected to see, were the ones on the stadium itself. Of course schools need to have sponsors to help finance a stadium of that size. The scoreboards of the major football teams around the country are all very much decorated, because everybody looks at the score of the game at some point of the game. These commercials are divided up in local sponsors and those big-time companies like coca cola. in the picture below you will see a scoreboard which has almost more commercials than information about the game. 

What I did not expect was the many interferences with the game itself. During the regular play-time the TV-station broadcasting this event had regular intervals for TV commercial breaks. These breaks where not organized around breaks in the game itself, but they dictated when the game had to stop for commercials to be shown on the TV-screen for the home-audience. This is not only annoying to everyone watching the game, but most of all for the players, since they just want to keep playing and stay in the zone. I can not imaging how frustrating it must be to wait on the field for 2-3 minutes for the commercials to be over. 

A surprise to me was that the players uniforms did not have advertisement on them. In Germany the soccer teams all have commercials on their shirts, since those are the things the audience sees moving all the time and these shirts are also available in the fan stores. The football teams in the US seem to not have allowed commercials on their shirts. At least that´s commercial free. 

After being to this event last week I have to say I am very confused about how this sport is increasingly about advertisement. It is not like I watched a game of a professional team of the NFL. These kids are just some college students, who might want to have a career in the NFL, but first they are college students. The hype about the games of the college league is in my opinion crazy. Companies want to be part of these events since they are broadcasted and talked about in the society so of course they pay much for the commercials. I believe this is a little too much and that college football, or sport itself should be more about the sport.