The NFL is our odds-on obsession

DO they still call baseball America’s pastime? Because it isn’t. America’s pastime is betting on the NFL. Also, pretending to work while you make your NFL office-pool picks; also, pretending to work while you’re checking an injury report on one of your fantasy league players.

Pro football’s hold on the collective American psyche is a phenomenon you can measure anecdotally (the Encino bar, in a city with no pro football team, showing a pre-season Packers-Bengals game while the Dodgers are in a pennant race) and more scientifically -- the somewhere-in-the-neighborhood of $500 million a season NBC is reportedly shelling out for the right to broadcast pro football on Sunday nights, in prime time.

Think of it as a reality show, an expensive one, with people in elaborate costumes. For the NFL has become in this country what soccer is in Europe -- a year-round obsession, an itch that simply cannot be scratched to satisfaction. Although here, unlike there, the football is played by relatively few of the many millions who watch.

No small wonder, then, that the man-boys who don’t play have resorted to chatting and fantasizing and wagering; it’s how you get the heart rate up.

More than $1 billion was gambled on pro football in Nevada last year, according to statistics from David Schwartz, director of the University of Nevada Las Vegas’ Center for Gaming Research.

That’s more than a billion bet legally, in one state; never mind the rest of us. Gambling is the elephant in a room becoming too small to contain its bulk. On TV, gossip fills the wagering jones afflicting millions during the roughly 36 weeks of the year in which games aren’t being played.

When the season starts, the tone goes from anticipatory to orgasmic.

Take two weeks ago, when, after the Steelers-Dolphins “Sunday Night” game on Thursday, I turned to “The Fantasy Show” on ESPN2.

“The quest for fantasy glory begins right now,” the host, Rob Stone, said exuberantly. “Fantasy glory” is slang for “how to win a lot of money.” Fantasy football puts the armchair quarterback in the position of armchair owner and general manager; each week, you field a team, the standings kept according to various player statistics. It’s a sport built for a network -- hey! -- that has popularized the partial-score ticker and game-day stat.

“A new coach I don’t like, from a fantasy perspective,” they were saying on “The Fantasy Show,” and “Fantasy-wise, what are we to make of this whole Deon Branch situation?”

Yes, from a fantasy perspective, read you loud and clear. Of course, as the teases told you, the fantasy league on ESPN.com is a free game. Host Stone and Matthew Berry, another guy who looked as if he’d never played football, were arranged on a living room set with someone who had -- analyst Ron Jaworski (all the guys call him “Jaws”). Standing off to the right, as if making the guys snacks in the kitchen, was Danni Boatwright, the comely brunet winner of CBS’ “Survivor: Guatemala.”

She was fantasizing too, about Houston Texans running back Wally Lundy. Jaws, meanwhile, was fantasizing about the Giants’ Brandon Jacobs. “You can’t arm-tackle this guy,” Jaws said. “He’ll rip right through a defender, take it to the house.”

He even showed a highlight. It was a clip of Jacobs’ cartoon image from EA Sports’ new version of the “Madden NFL” video game. Taking it to the house.

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PLAYING THE GAME

The ’07 version of the hyper-realistic “Madden NFL” was unveiled in August in a pay-per-view special on ESPN called “Inside Madden NFL ’07.”

No figure since Howard Cosell has been a better ambassador to the commercialization of the NFL than John Madden, the irascible-seeming but ultimately huggable ex-coach.

Madden and Al Michaels, the last of the great “Monday Night Football” broadcasting teams, now call NBC’s “Sunday Night Football,” while ESPN takes over “MNF,” with the Washington Post’s Tony Kornheiser in the Cosell role. He joins Jaws and Boomer but not the Bus, Jerome Bettis, NBC’s new hire.

The competition has the networks trying to out-Busby Berkeley each other; regular season games are to the Super Bowl what the Golden Globes are to the Oscars.

Studio shows are like sports books without the cocktail waitresses, Howie Long sitting next to you instead of some guy wanting to compare parlay cards. You watch these shows long enough and you become mesmerized by the sheer size of a guy’s tailor-made shirt collar, the expert craftsmanship on display. Talk itself is about football, at a decibel influenced by “Meet the Press” and “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf.” For me, though, it’s all about having one of those suits. You know, fantasy-wise.

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paul.brownfield@latimes.com

Brownfield is a Times TV critic.