All those appalling commercial breaks

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As the NFL plays again in London, it’s time to reveal the Top Three Complaints About American Football Heard or Overheard During Three Years in the United Kingdom.

In third place, we have ‘There are too many statistics.’ If you think about it, soccer boasts a liberty from studying a game’s statistics, freeing up more time for worthy pursuits such as, you know, going to pubs.

In second place, we have ‘They’re wearing too much equipment.’ It’s curious to ponder what it might say about our national character that our real national pastime features such a limited view of actual humanity.

It probably says nothing at all, except that Auburn just hopes to beat the hell out of Alabama.

In first place, and a landslide at that, would be ‘Too many breaks in the action.’ True, if you spend enough time watching soccer, and then watch American football once more, you can end up annoyed at all the halts.

An antidote for that, though, came from the great American football coach Howard Schnellenberger, who in an interview in his office once asked a reporter to think about American football as a concept and name its best attribute.

Reporter, fumbling around: ‘A team requires athletes of so many different sizes.’

No, said Schnellenberger, it’s that 20- to 30-second gap between plays. That’s the best thing about American football. The inactivity not only leaves time for serial strategy adjustments from the sidelines, but allows the construction of anticipation, excitement, dread, hope and tension in the audience.

If you think about something like those closing moments of USC-Notre Dame in 2005 and the beautiful agony that wedged all those crescendo plays -- agony that mushroomed while the athletes just stood around in huddles -- you could just feel that Schnellenberger had a point.

-- Chuck Culpepper