Nearly great sports procedural. Nearly.

Rating: 7/10 (7 March 2019)

I have long thought that "procedural" is a broader category than it is given credit for. Everyone believes in police procedurals, a few admit there are medical procedurals, but I think there can be anything. This is a Sports Procedural.
And it works as such. A drama, wrapped around and constrained by the minutiae of the process such as the time constraint.
It even has a sort of "mystery" of discovering what the right choice is, and why. It works for me.
I assume it was set up for an international market as some clever plan to make everyone love American Football, by over-explaining stuff, but I think the intros to each city, etc. worked well actually. I assume some are annoyed by this however.
The core actors do a pretty good job. Costner is a bit too typical Costner but pretty good, Garner is... well, her best role is certainly credit card commercials unfortunately, but Denis Leary is excellent (and not too much like himself), Frank Langella is surprisingly nuanced for the Evil Businessman. Aside from Sam Elliott who is always awesome, the supporting cast is really, really hit and miss, with way too many misses. I suspect - knowing nothing of football - a lot were stunt casting, or gifts to the league. A few people even seemed like they should have had lines, but were edited out because they were just too awful.
All in all, a pretty good story, a pretty good script, but let down by some poor acting, and some odd editing choices (oh lord, that split screen crap).