When two of the worst teams in football play each other, and no one cares, does it make a sound?

Probably not, and that’s why such a matchup would likely be scheduled in hangover buffer zone — 1 p.m. on Sunday — and would not appear on television outside of the local markets. It’s just not a “big game,” in any sense of the term.

So what makes a big game? The same thing that makes any event entertaining: a good storyline. It could be a longstanding rivalry, pregame trash talk, a playoff chase or any other sort of drama that naturally inspires human interest. Sports work as a business for the same reason reality TV works: people love to watch other people with more exciting lives than their own.

Watching two subpar teams slug it out usually isn’t that exciting. If it turns out to be a great battle, then the game might draw some attention after the fact, but that’s what Sportscenter’s Top Plays are for. Most of the nation would agree that Bills-Lions does not belong on national television.

It’s easy to point out games that obviously don’t belong, but harder to identify the ones that do. Theoretically, it should be the rivalry games between talented, division-leading teams with electric, All-Star rosters and legendary coaches. Unfortunately, the schedule cookie doesn’t always crumble like that. When the slate on any given Sunday is littered with garbage games, ESPN and Fox fall back on their favorite activity besides reporting sports news: creating sports news.

In this dystopian universe where ESPN and Fox revolutionized the entertainment and business facets of sports, they have the ability to define what is news. A game isn’t important until ESPN says it is. This isn’t all bad; ESPN does a good job covering the games that deserve it.

But more often, they hype up the games that don’t deserve it, just because there’s nothing else on. When a dud game lands in a primetime slot, the preceding week is spent breaking down slow-motion footage of a few OK players on two OK teams, huffing and puffing and using fancy graphics to distract the viewers from the truth: the product they’re watching just isn’t that good.

Sportscenter’s ringleaders do such a great job dazzling the crowd inside the big top tent of the sports world that the audience hardly notices that the Bearded Lady is actually just a skinny dude with a gland problem and a soul patch.

So far this season, Brett Favre seems to be the hottest attraction in the NFL circus. On ESPN’s Oct. 5 telecast of Monday Night Football, 21.8 million viewers watched Favre down the Packers, 30-23, in Minnesota. It was the most-watched programming in cable television history. Two weekends ago when Brett Favre made his triumphant return to Lambeau Field as a Minnesota Viking, 28.9 million viewers tuned in — the highest number of viewers for a Fox Sunday NFL telecast since 1995.

Why do we care so much about Brett Favre? Well, because ESPN cares about Brett Favre. Over the summer, the network spent weeks tracking Favre’s every move, over-analyzing every bite of Wheaties as a potential clue to his future plans. Now that the network and its viewers are wrapped up in the Brett Favre Show, the spurned quarterback’s battles against his old lover is such high theater that almost 30 million people tune in.

It’s a great example of our society’s ability to produce cultural phenomena simply by paying extra attention. Balloon Boy is only famous because an entire nation followed his saga all afternoon. Kanye West probably interrupts a few people every day with hilarious and infinitely imitable phrases, but everyone happened to notice it at the VMAs.

On Monday night, ESPN will treat its viewers to the rump roast of NFL programming: Baltimore (4-4) at Cleveland (1-7!). Despite the overwhelming mediocrity, “Ravens” and “Browns” will become trending topics on Twitter, and Tuesday’s water-cooler chatter will inevitably turn to the previous night’s game, when sports fans watched the Baltimore-Cleveland balloon float across the sky while the real story was throwing up in the attic.