I keep saying that sports is really the only reason why I keep cable TV around, but out of 27 innings of Red Sox playoff baseball over the last week, I watched exactly one inning. And I didn’t care that I had missed it. I’m trying to get to the root of this one, but in the end I think it’s a couple of things:

• The Bruins are good again and everyone knows hockey is where my loyalties are. I took a few years off from that loyalty because the team took a few years off of being compelling. While I still believe hockey today is way too watered down with too many teams and in need of much fixing, I’m paying attention to the local team quite a bit regardless. Not sure it’s enough yet for that to be the only reason to keep cable around, but I have two months to decide (that’s when my Fios contract comes up).

• Another reason is that the Red Sox broke the curse. It’s simply not as enticing of a story anymore and every Sox fan knows it. Breaking the curse has actually initiated a personal curse of relative indifference for me. This has nothing to do with their showing in this year’s playoffs, by the way, because I felt the same thing in 2006 and 2007…..and still do now. Could also be that baseball is broken as well. Has anyone in MLB noticed that the leagues with salary caps are so much more balanced and interesting?

• Another reason is time. I don’t have any. Even if I did, I’d choose to spend it with my kids because I’m never getting that time back. Sports will be around every year. The kids won’t. I’ll get back to it when the time is right. In a few years I suspect the boys will want to watch sports and that’s fine. But right now there’s more productive and fun things to do with them.

• Football? Well, I will watch a compelling football game, but it’s almost always the playoffs. Regular season football games do very little for me and historically, I’ve never been one to watch regular season football.  Yesterday I DVR’d the Patriots game because I got a ridiculous thought in my head that I might be able to watch it. The end result was that I fast forwarded to the last 5:00 of the game. That’s pretty much the only way I’ll watch football in the regular season, because I don’t see the need (right now) to kill four hours like that.

• Basketball? Doesn’t even exist in my world.

So there you have it. I’m basically keeping cable around for the Bruins and even that is teetering on the edge for me. What we really need is for someone (a start-up or an established player like Apple) to step up and cut direct deals with the sports networks to turn the business of sports on television on its heels. This needs to happen.