Last week, I asked if all of us watched too much football, and you responded: Probably, nitwit! This week, I vowed to watch less football. But as a service to Journal readers, I wanted to add a dangerous, don’t-try-this-at-home twist:

I would watch only bad football.

Not mediocre, we probably-won’t-make-the-playoffs football. I mean the truly dispiriting, despondent, occasionally eye-gouging stuff. The type of football you would not watch if you were snowed in at an airport. A prison airport, in the mountains, with only one TV.

Football gets talked up as the ultimate in American entertainment, and the numbers bear out the mania, but for all the macho chatter about parity and Any Given Sunday-Blabbedy-Blah-Blabbedy, the league gets away with a lot of crummy product. There may be no such thing as bad pizza or a bad Bill Murray anecdote, but there’s plenty of bad NFL, every weekend, a hearty portion not far away from me, in the Meadowlands.

Blowouts, battles of ineptitude, quarterback disasters, ghost defenses, dazed coaches, fans fleeing stadiums—it’s not in the commercials or the testimonials of the NFL’s might, but it’s there.