How NFL football grew into the most annoying sport

	Daunte Culpepper's apology for the Love Boat incident is a good example of how the NFL offseason is going. Damian Strohmeyer/SI

When I first began covering sports back in the late '80s, when hip-hop was green, laptops had three-line screens and athletes' phones had answering machines, the baseball geeks ruled my professional world. Though the NFL was far more popular than major league baseball, media coverage of the respective sports seemed to suggest otherwise.

The NFL was a big deal during its season, and then, after the wretched excess of the Super Bowl, it essentially went into hibernation. Baseball, with its rotisserie teams, hot-stove leagues and legions of obsessive stat nerds, seemed never-ending. The AL's and NL's annual awards, smartly revealed after the World Series, commanded massive media attention, as did trade talk, free-agent signings, arbitration hearings and the much-hyped winter meetings. Spring training was covered with an anticipatory giddiness that evoked images of rebirth to many writers, editors and readers -- and, to folks like me, images of regurgitation.

The height of this compulsively reverential treatment of the alleged national pastime occurred in 1998, when Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa waged a two-pronged assault on Roger Maris' single-season home run record, each ultimately surpassing the previous mark with respective totals of 70 and 66. I'll never forget overhearing a fellow reporter in a football press box, eyes gleaming, recounting his gleeful witnessing of McGwire's 62nd dinger -- on television. "It was the greatest thing I've ever seen in my life!" he said breathlessly. (Later that afternoon, when Sosa hit his 61st and 62nd homers, temporarily tying up the race, I surmised that the same reporter had just experienced the second-greatest happening on God's great earth.)

Back then, I used to wonder: How did baseball manage to cast such a spell upon a public that, at least according to ratings and surveys, was far more interested in pro football? Now, I ask myself a different question: Is it possible that the NFL has finally become even more insufferable than baseball?

Sadly, after perusing the news from this late-March week in which SI released its 2006 baseball preview issue, I've concluded that the answer is, to paraphrase my old interview subject Randy Moss, HAY-ELL yes.