It's different programming. You rarely burn down a city after a movie. Sports go in circles, they mimic the natural cycles and are highly addictive. That's not the worst part, it's more about the lost time and it's making the fans lose focus on more important things in life.

There are also benefits like you've mentioned. It releases the social pressure in a very controlled manner. They're good for practicing the memory game, unfortunately the data is mostly junk. It's really good for studying numbers and human behavior. The data sets are really impressive. I've done it for many years before bitcoin.

Although sports are really good for health and whatnot, watching them is a sneaky form of energy theft and the games per se are rigged. However, there are upsides like those mentioned above. Everyone will get there when they get there.