College football doesn’t need more hurry-up offense. It needs more
hurry-up games.

Sunday’s nationally televised game between the University of Memphis
and Ole Miss started at 2:30 p.m. and ended shortly before 6 p.m. If
you parked, walked, arrived on time, stayed for the final ticks of the
clock, and battled the traffic jams — admittedly a welcome
problem to have at a football game — you put in a five-hour
afternoon, six if you tailgated.

The French eat lunch, go home, make love, and smoke a cigarette in
less time than that, and there’s more action.

The busiest guy on the field was the one in the red shirt charged
with halting and starting the game around the commercials. Nothing like
22 finely tuned athletes and a team of officials standing idly at the
line of scrimmage for two minutes several times a quarter to shift the
crowd’s attention to their cell phones. Blessedly, neither team used
all of its timeouts in the first half or the game might have ended in
darkness.

Hockey and soccer, two sports that get their share of criticism for
being un-American and low-scoring, at least keep the puck or ball
moving for several minutes at a time. Soccer is basically two 45-minute
halves with a 10-minute halftime. Hockey has three 20-minute periods of
up-and-down action and two Zamboni breaks.

Televised college and pro football has become the glacier of
spectator sports. Nobody watches just one game on television, of
course. They switch back and forth between kitchen and television(s),
watching two or three or four different games, while keeping an eye on
the scroll at the bottom of the flat screen to see who’s doing what to
whom somewhere else.

The University of Memphis is in a tough spot. There are no more
nationally ranked or Southeastern Conference teams on the home schedule
this year. Ole Miss fans in red clustered in the north end zone
appeared to be outnumbered at least three to one by U of M fans in
blue, but 10,000 or so visitors is still a nice bump in a stadium that
seats 60,000 and change.

Super-fan Harold Byrd and the Bank of Bartlett hosted 3,000 people
for blues and barbecue at a pre-game party at the old cattle barn. “On
a Sunday when it was hot as the devil and the game was televised, I was
proud of that,” Byrd said.

The stadium staff did a good job of getting people in and out. We
were out of range of the scalpers and outside the crowded Gate 1 off of
Hollywood by 2:15 p.m, through the turnstile at 2:20 p.m., and sweating
profusely in our sunny-side seats by 2:25 p.m. (and moved to the
abundant empty seats on the shady upper west side by the middle of the
first quarter). The concourse was clear, the rest-rooms reasonably
clean, and there were plenty of concessions if you didn’t want Hawaiian
shaved ice. Beer was on sale for the first time at $7 a can, which
tends to tamp down on overindulgence. The marching bands did the first
of what will surely be 1,000 tributes to the music of Michael Jackson,
and the U of M golden girl was the best of the baton twirlers.

The “jumbotron” screen at the south end zone, however, is as
outdated as a 24-inch television set. Most of the skyboxes on the east
side had tenants, but they’re a long way from the field. My colleague
Greg Akers, who covered the game, said the press box did not have
wireless, and the revamped media room looks like it used to be a
visitor’s locker room with old wood cubbies and folding chairs. The
Americans With Disabilities Act-mandated handicapped seating, the focus
of much attention and expense, was at most one-third full. The stadium
surroundings leave much to be desired. There are still remnants of the
fairgrounds and not much green until you get over to East Parkway. A
walk through the Grove (or the very attractive U of M campus) this was
not.

Memphis, even if it can’t execute a quarterback sneak, has some good
players like running back Curtis Steele and defender Deante’ Lamar and
a decent team. But decent won’t be good enough to draw anything close
to 45,000 with Tennessee-Martin, Marshall, and UTEP next up on the home
schedule. The scalpers’ profits will sink like a subprime mortgage, and
we’ll be bemoaning the lack of traffic jams soon enough.