I’ve heard that the average NFL game has about 16 minutes of action each game.
Meaning that if you take a stopwatch and start it for example, when the quarterback takes the snap and stop the watch when the ref’s whistle blows the play dead and time actual “play time”, one comes up with about 4 minutes each quarter.
Does this sound right?
Wall St. Journal looked at 4 games and they found an average of around 11 minutes of actual play per NFL game.
One wonders then, why a game that supposedly consists of four fifteen minute quarters last sometimes as much as three hours…
Sometimes? Try “typically”.
I’d be surprised if the answer is as high as 16 minutes, honestly.
Since I wasn’t raised with football, the amount of actual play kept me from getting into it for years upon years. Then I looked at it as a chess game, or a series of strategic battles, and have started watching it in the last few years. I like it now.
There are still some things I don’t ‘get’ (like ‘taking a knee’), but it’s coming slowly.
Sounds about right. Given that the action is condensed into so few minutes, I’d bet that the number of “you better pay attention to this something cool might happen” minutes is alot higher than in other sports. In soccar, for instance, the anticipation of something cool happening right before a goal may last only for a few seconds.
I’ve heard 10-11 minutes, depending on the source.
The reason it takes well over 3 hours (and college games take longer) is simply that the game clock is frequently stopped. This is just as true of hockey and basketball, which also have 60-minute game clocks but both of which take over two hours to complete the average game.
Except in BB and hockey there is not much standing around when the clock is running.
I am old enough to have had season tickets before TV called the timeouts. It was hard to imagine football letting commercial business actually interfere with the flow of the game. Now the game fits in between the commercials. When they started doing it ,it was gradual. First one or 2 a quarter. Now a game takes all day.
Taking a knee means that you give up a down to run time off the clock. If there’s a minute left in the game and the other team has used all of their timeouts you take two knees to run off the last minute.
It wasn’t always like that. They used to play all the way through to the end. That changed quite dramatically due to the infamous Miracle at the Meadowlands. Now every team does it, for obvious reasons.
They play 48 minutes in the NBA, 4 12 minute quarters.
40 in the NCAA, 2 20 minute halves.
but in football, commercials take up 60% of the broadcast, adding up to a total of 60-75 minutes per game. That’s simply ridiculous.
I disagree with this. Soccer is all about the build-up. It comes in waves and can last for many many plays. Soccer is by far my favorite sport to watch, though, so I’m a bti biased.
for those curious, btw, the WSJ article is here
I knew somebody in high school who did this with a baseball game once – just clicking a stopwatch from when the ball left the pitcher’s hand to when the pitch was either completed or, if the ball was put in play, whenever the play ended. He ended up with like 9 minutes of actual action, and a lot of that was foul balls. The count for actual action action – the ball hit fair and in play – was like 2 minutes.
It does seem amazing such American sports are so popular; baseball is even “worse.” Compare with games of the Rest Of The World, like soccer.
It’s only the replays from all camera angles that make football enjoyable for me to watch.
I’m sure basketball has interesting tactics which, due to some mental deficiency, I don’t think I’d be able to appreciate unless I watched the game in slow-motion throughout.
A lot of the college football coaches shows, they can cram the whole game into about 30 minutes, allowing for some instant replays, commercials, and coaches banter.
I think the Simpsons did an excellent job of demonstrating how most Americans feel about soccer.
Not the best quality video in the world but I’m sure you’ll get it. I don’t watch a whole lot of football these days -I missed the Super Bowl this year- but I’d rather watch a game of that than soccer or most other sports. Of course football has a lot of time for commercial breaks. They’ve got to pay those player’s salaries some how.
I can actually remember coming tho this conclusion myself, when I was in the process of losing my interest in football. It was the year after the Bears won, in which season I had watched every minute of every game. The next season they were not as good, and I started thinking that I was spending a whole lot of the best fall afternoons in front of the tube.
Once I realized how much of the game is people just standing around, it became hard to focus on anything else. And while everyone is just standing around, and I was just sitting on the couch, I started thinking of how many better ways I could be spending my time.
Years ago I remember reading an article touting a new MLB.com feature: condensed games. They only show the last pitch of every at-bat. I seem to remember them claiming it only took 12 minutes to watch an entire game, but of course you had to pay a fee. Had that service been free I would have put in a legitimate effort to become an MLB fan by watching all 162 Mets condensed games that year.
I used to love when MSG ran Rangers rewind, showing the “best” hour of every Rangers game, broadcast at 11pm every game night. I must have watched like 40 or 50 the first season I discovered them, and it was friggin’ awesome. I felt very connected to the Rangers that year and that could have turned into quite fanship. But they stopped doing it the next year so I gave up on hockey.
The NFL network does shorty versions of all football games, which rocks. In addition to snap-to-whistle coverage, they also throw in some key replays, officials calling penalties and reviews, etc… End up being 30 minutes for a game. Fantastic service, that. They even do their best to avoid cutting in the middle of an announcer’s sentence. (They use the actual broadcast footage.) That’s one of the factors that plays into how I personally edit my Giants tapes, though I only “shorty” the other team’s sustained successful drives. Thus, any given Giants game in my library is around 90 minutes. (The playoff run in 2007 ended up around 2 hours per game because so much of them was compelling.)
Same thing in baseball, except you have to allow for scratching/cup adjusting, posturing and spitting.
RDS does this with Canadiens games…they call it Canadiens Express, and condense the major action/penatlies/goals/fights into 60 minutes plus commercials. They run it at midnight after a game, usually, and I know I’ve seen it on the following mornings as well (9 or 10am). I’ve never really watched it though.