Maybe this is a sign that I have been out of the country for too long. Or maybe for long enough.

I really don’t care what happens in the National Football League.

Biggest sports concept in America, right? The NFL? Baseball sorta doing a slow fade to irrelevance, and basketball kinda hanging around, popular, but not everywhere; hockey always a niche sport, soccer the “sport of the future and always will be” …

A few Americans came over to the apartment last night, and we had some shwarma and chatted with one of the new arrivals to the country, and then it was time for an NFL game from the East Coast, and the Yanks who live downstairs went down and got a laptop from which they somehow can get NFL games, and we hooked a cable to the big TV, and there were the Giants and Chiefs.

And we watched, and it was almost exactly like approximately 1,000 NFL games I have seen over the past couple of decades, with five receivers running short routes and third-and-1 as a passing down, and the same plastic cheerleaders and silly fans paying too much for another game out of the NFL cookie-cutter …

And I just didn’t care.

Coincidentally, this came within a couple of days of one of our U.S. correspondents, based on the east side of the country and (turns out) spectacularly uninformed about the NFL and Los Angeles, writing a comment piece on how L.A.s is NFL-less because of some sort of NFL fondness for small markets; no, really. He wrote that. And then I sent him an email telling him how horribly wrong he was about that, ascribing anything but greed to the NFL.

And I had to tell him that L.A. without an NFL team (for nearly two decades now) is about two things — 1) the league preferring to have the country’s second-biggest market empty because it allows every other team in the league to extort hundreds of millions of bucks from their local rubes for new stadiums every 20 years or so and 2) that citizens of L.A. and all of SoCal, for that matter, simply will not pay the$1 billion or so needed, these days, to build the new stadium an NFL team would require. I mean, heaven forbid a team should spend its own money on a stadium in L.A.

(This is a city that already has the Rose Bowl and the Coliseum, where UCLA and USC do very good business, thank you, decade after decade.)

So, yeah. Kinda over the NFL. The Chiefs crushed the Giants, and then we saw Seattle beat Houston in overtime in large part because of an inevitable personal foul that put the Seahawks in range for the inevitable 50-yard field goal.

(At some point, we should address changing NFL rules, for those who still care, to make field goals harder or cheaper, and to give defenses a fair shot of stopping a 2-yard pass whenever the other teams wants, but without creating a world where even more concussions are possible.)

So, some U.S. sports I miss, in terms of watching. Vin Scully doing the Dodgers. Random college football. The Lakers.

But the NFL? Actually, I pretty much gave up on that league before I got on a plane for Abu Dhabi. Four hours of it last night just hammered it home.