Isn't that how super bowl works? Did try to see it once but was more ads than play. Not sure if all American "football" matches are like that or if it's only the final
I'd always assumed the causation arrow was in the opposite direction. Or at least a big reason a sport is popular in the US is its ad-friendliness.
The other kind of football is flowing and therefore less attractive to ad supported TV networks.
The action is short and violent, which makes it both exciting and yet easy to watch while chatting with your friends. You can't miss a critical shift in the play because you had to look away for a few moments.
Most men (and many women) played it as children and teenagers, and so have a strong sense of nostalgia for it.
Many small towns pretty much only had football as entertainment for many years prior to the internet - it has momentum among the older audiences.
Football represents the epitome of the American dream. Everyone "knows" someone who has "made it" to the NFL, no matter how tenuous the connection may be. It reinforces the idea that anyone can make it if they just work hard enough.
We don't watch adverts - Netflix, amazon, IPlayer. However each year we do make an effort to hunt out the Christmas adverts on YouTube -- John Lewis, Sainsbury's, Tesco etc.
Adverts cost a fortune. If 10 million people watch a half hour program, that's 1.5m hours of wasted time - costing something like $20m. Then you end up paying through increased prices of the goods being advertised (there's obviously a return on investment)