I'd bet some of this is CRTs and public non-digital television at the time.

While we can look at current N64 graphics and compare it to IRL, we're like "HUH? Not even close". But that's not the comparison that was happening in the 90s.

In the 90s, sports were usually shot on a shitty film camera, then converted into signals that ran at 480p and broadcast across shitty infrastructure. These were then shown on really fuzzy CRTs with awful washed out colors and blown up really large. Not to mention, if you didn't have cable (which many people didnt), we're also talking radio transmission and bunny ears which even further shittied the picture. What real sports looked like on TV was also, by today's standards, total ass.

But now we have digital cameras sending 4k digital signals to high resolution and vivid color TVs. It's totally different.

Not to mention, the fuzziness of CRTs made N64 era graphics seem better because it would essentially anti alias for you and such and make things look rounder than they actually were, which was one of the hardest things to do in that era.

It's hard to even relate to this because even if you go find a sports broadcast from the and watch it now, you're still not experiencing the shitty CRT and it's pathetic reproduction. You kind of can't even see how bad this shit was unless you watch like someone's home camcorder recording a CRT and watch THAT footage.

Does it excuse her? Not entirely. I'm sure if you really looked you could figure it out during closeups of the players and such. But at a passing glance, this is way more understandable if you think about what her reference for what "real sports on TV" looked like.