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Point me to the popular sport where I can't make this complaint. I mean, the answer is hockey, which is the least popular of the major pro sports leagues and faces constant ratings decline. A game that is 99% fluff appears to be the only sustainable model for a sports league.
Baseball games take a long time between pitches and even longer between balls in play. Football games are short bursts of action between huddles and commercial breaks. Soccer is just endless dribbling and back passing and writhing around on the ground. Basketball seems like it features a lot of action and points scoring, but outside of the playoffs they mostly just go through the motions until the 4th quarter, and so many points are scored that every individual scoring play isn't that exciting. NASCAR races are mostly just watching left turns, long periods of time can pass with nothing really happening. Combat sports are probably the most variable of any sport, but you can't watch a full UFC card and not catch some really real lay'n'pray snoozefests.
The reality is simple: "boring" sports are just a matter of personal perception. If you don't understand or don't care about the game, then it's boring to watch; if you understand the game on a deep level and care about it, then it's interesting.
All sports are a matter of perception. There was a big debate among people a number of years ago as to whether or not “e-Sports” would ever become a thing in America and take after their peers in Asia who’d already developed a system for it. Since then it’s slowly bled into acceptance in niche areas in the west overtime, but still not enough to get mainstream coverage on ESPN or some large news platform. A loose acquaintance of mine I used to play team matches with in SC2 (and very loosely knew back on Battle.net on SC1) was a guy by the handle of “DreXxiN”. A few years ago I typed his name into Google and it directed me to some website that I think was called eSports Heaven or something like that. From the looks of it he tried an upstart to occupy a place in eSports news coverage. No idea how it’s working out for him and haven’t hit him up in a number of years, but that kind of thing is there.
Baseball never had any real appeal to me. Skateboarding back in the days of the X-Games I was addicted to; and I used to skate when I was a teenager, along with a younger cousin of mine. I was never terribly good at it but we still loved it (and of course were consequently addicted to the Tony Hawk PlayStation games). Professional bowling I loved to watch when I was younger but finding it was always a pain in the ass. Football? Meh. I’ll catch it in the playoffs, or when the Raiders or playing; or when the 49ers are losing. Basketball I love. Chess I follow to a decent degree, as I used to play it competitively. I suppose it really is a matter of perception.
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Hockey, soccer, basketball and rugby are at least played fairly continuously, without timeouts between plays and numerous play reviews and flags on top of timeouts and TV breaks. I like tge game, but if you’re not used to turn-based play where you get time to set everything up 4 times and run the play to see what happens, it’s kinda boring and I think it makes the games longer than they need to be.
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