you're right. compared to nfl, nfl, etc, you load slow.
i attribute most of that to your images. you have many images that are very big. if the user wants a bigger image, let them click on it and pop up a new window/tab. the other sites use much less color and images. you use images as backgrounds, they have white or simple web safe colors. once i loaded your page and cached it, however, the load time was drastically reduced since i had the images already. repeat viewers should be happy, but thats not what you want. you want to catch their eye immediately to keep them there altogether. all of your links are images, which also slows down load time. all in all. thats my diagnosis. even optimized, images take a while to load. once their cached, they're fine, but initial loads will be slow.