I'm watching a Britney Spears concert tonight, hoping an NFL game breaks out. It's Britney at 8 and Lisa Guerrero at 9. Then, quite possibly, football.

"We have the opportunity to inspire the mood of the country," informs John Collins, the NFL's senior vice president of marketing and entertainment. Do tell.

No offense, but the only thing inspired by the sight of Aretha Franklin, 35 years after "Chain of Fools," is the Atkins Diet.

Collins calls the hour-long concert tonight, before the New York Jets-Washington Redskins game, "an inspiring celebration of American values." If we're really lucky, Britney will celebrate her values by lip-locking with Mary J. Blige on the steps of the Washington Monument.

It makes you want to take a 12-year-old on your knee and tell him, "You know, kid, back when I was your age, we didn't need entertainment with the games. The games were the entertainment." Except the kid would stare at you as if you had an eye in your forehead.

The NFL spent nearly $10 million on tonight's pregame hour. Throw in the promotion and marketing and more than a week on the Mall in Washington, and the league spent $35 million. The idea was to try to duplicate the Super Bowl circus, to make the opening of the season as momentous as the final curtain.

"Like the Olympics, which has clear opening and closing ceremonies," was how one marketing consultant explained it to the New York Times.

Not exactly. The Olympics open and close with hope and dignity. The NFL opens and closes with Mariah Carey. Reason being, the games themselves aren't enough anymore. Which, unless you're a student of Ms. Spears' navel, isn't a good thing.

There is nothing special about the games now, not when they're all on TV. Not when one game bleeds into the next, when the six TV screens you're watching in the sports bar all have different games but look exactly the same. Certainly not when cable TV and sports talk radio have beaten every issue so dead by kickoff, your imagination has no place to wander but the refrigerator.

Who wouldn't need a little Britney break?

As a kid, I remember coming home from Washington Redskins games at RFK Stadium (now vacant, no luxury boxes) to watch West Coast NFL games (the Los Angeles Rams, kids) on (black-and-white) TV. It was exotic and mysterious. It was December and the fans wore short sleeves.

Now, I gotta get past an hour of Britney, Aretha and God knows who else, just to get to a 9 p.m. football game I won't be able to watch all the way through. That doesn't matter, though. Football isn't the point, anyway.

Sports leagues have determined their next generation of fans won't be satisfied with run-of-the-mill jock excellence. They want entertainment with their entertainment, Britney upon Aretha upon fossilized Aerosmith, until we turn it all into such a spectacle, it can never live up to its hype. It can be nothing but a letdown.

To some of us, sports today is like opening a very big box to find a very small present. Go Redskins. And take Steven Tyler with you.

E-mail pdaugherty@enquirer.com