You settle down to watch a bit of golf on a Saturday afternoon and instead of seeing Leona Maguire, Lauren Walsh and the like doing their thing, you’re greeted by Michael Portillo on the Dart heading for Dún Laoghaire. And him looking like the Tricolour in his Kelly green jacket and orange pants.But when the heavens waited a whole three months to open, timing their monsoon for the Irish Open, RTÉ were left having to fill the gap while the players headed for The K Club’s tumble dryers. Mind you, Michael and his Great Coastal Railway Journeys was an unusual choice for a golf-starved audience.There was nothing for it, then, but to switch over to the Aer Lingus College Football Classic at the Aviva Stadium. Now, some of this couch’s dearest friends are American Football fans, and they’re relatively stable individuals, so there’ll be no disparagement here. But watching weeds grow is surely more exhilarating than observing this sport?No matter, the occasion brought an estimated 14,000 Americans to Dublin, and that was just the Horned Frogs and Tar Heels squads, around the same number of fans coming too. TG4 put on a very big show, Máire Treasa Ní Dhubhghaill our host, ably assisted by Cuán Ó Flatharta, with enough pundits to fill the North Stand. One of them, Michael McQuaid, didn’t know what to expect from the Tar Heels because they have 60 new recruits this year, which kind of makes them the Chelsea of college football, but there wasn’t a great deal of optimism among their supporters arriving at the ground. Cuán: “Are you hopeful for this year?” Tar Heels devotee: “No.”Cuán: “Why?”Tar Heels devotee: “Because we’re really bad.”A UNC cheerleader at the game between TCU Horned Frogs and North Carolina Tar Heels. Photograph: Nick Elliott/Inpho That was quite blunt, but as it proved, it was the Frog people who were really bad in the final 49 minutes, failing to pierce the rearguard of babe magnet Bill Belichick’s team. And speaking of babe magnets. Richard Keys went off on one last week when he targeted poor old Match of the Day, suggesting to his old mucker Andy Gray on their podcast that the programme was “well past its sell-by date”.This, he argued, is because by the time the show comes on air, we’ve all seen the goals on social media, so there’s no more waiting up with bated breath to see, say, Bruno Fernandes’s hat-trick, especially when you just transferred him out of your Fantasy team in a fit of pique and you don’t want to see it any way. Occasional Match of the Day commentator Dan O’Hagan responded to this analysis by describing Richard and Andy as “a pair of old, unemployable dinosaurs” who say “controversial things for clicks” and are “no better than the YouTubers or the s**t-takes-for-likes influencers”. Other than that, he kept his whisht.But it is indeed a very different broadcasting climate this weather and never, in the history of time, was that demonstrated more spectacularly than on Friday night when the Jamie Vardy’s Having A Party YouTube channel hosted a watch-along for the Bayern Munich v Stuttgart game – Jamie having won live rights for seven Friday night Bundesliga games in the UK and Ireland.No, you’re not hallucinating: the Jamie Vardy’s Having A Party YouTube channel has won some live Bundesliga rights. [ Parochial triumphalism can’t keep papering over Celtic’s European failuresOpens in new window ]And the watch-along was a unique experience, Jamie and his guests Christian Fuchs, his former Leicester team-mate, and broadcaster Manish Bhasin having a few beers and a natter while entirely ignoring large chunks of the game that was being beamed live on the screen. Jamie reminisced about his Leicester days and hinted at his year in Italy being muck (“it was an experience, that’s all I’ll say”); Christian recalled the time a Bundesliga president once brought “something like a lion” on to a pitch and somebody got bitten by it (“definitely not a dog”), while Manish tried, largely in vain, to get “Vards” and “Fooksie” to watch even a little bit of the game. This all lasted two hours and 23 minutes. By the end of it, you’d almost have been pining for Michael Portillo’s Dart adventures or even 49 minutes of the Horned Frogs not scoring. And certainly the beloved dinosaur that is Match of the Day.