Sports aside for the moment, as anyone ever watched a movie in fast-forward? If you set it to, like, x1.5, you can barely tell the difference but the movie’s over in 1:20 instead of 2 hours. Wonderful fun!
We hear a lot about soccer hooligans, but I understand cricket fans can become quite cranky too if you wake them up.
When I watch football on my DVR, I like to skip from shortly after the previous play ends to when the center touches the ball. There’s some pre-snap stuff that I count as action.
With hockey, the only times I can fast forward when the clock is running is after a dump-in and line change or a clear by a penalty-kill unit. Even then it’s only a few seconds.
You make many unwarranted assumptions. There is well over two hours of in-game broadcast during any given NFL broadcast. Other than the breaks between quarters, all commercial breaks are 90 seconds or less.
I edit down Giants games to remove commercials, in-game live commercials, all replay timeouts, anything slow between plays, and everything except snap-to-whistle on around half of the opponent’s plays. I’m still left with 90 minutes per game. In the 2007 postseason when they won the Superbowl, the four playoff games take up 2 hours each on my tape(s). That’s two hours of broadcast worthy of being preserved, and that’s not counting the majority of time in those long, sustained Cowboys drives or the long sustained Patriots drives in the Superbowl.
Most of an NFL broadcast is devoted to the game. Your estimates are far less charitable than the reality merits.
The clock runs when the ball is put into play. That means that the offense can advance the ball towards the defense’s goal. Which can include a man in motion before the snap, the defense adjusting in reaction to the offense’s lineup, the offense lining up and snapping the ball without a huddle etc. A lot can and does happen during regulation play.
Thread title read. 60 minutes of play.
this is simply not true. A stop between every play does not equate to their being more strategy, not by any means. In soccer and basketball and such (possibly much more in soccer than basketball, I honestly don’t know) the players aren’t moving down the field randomly, hoping to end up in a decent position. They’re running set plays that they’ve run time and time and time again. The ball is always moved down the field in a certain, triangular pattern. Everyone has routes they run depending on where the ball is, where the defenders and attackers are, and where the ball is most likely to go. Saying that just because there aren’t nearly as many stoppages means their’s less strategy is just ignorance, the players just have to be better at thinking of the strategy on the fly
Soccer is a strange exception. Stoppage time is generally only added on for injuries, not the ball going out of bounds. However, the clock DOES stop, just often not the clock they show you. In soccer, only the ref keeps the official time. The time on the screen isn’t exact. Strange, outdated rule, but it still exists
Well done, Jimmy. Now run along.
Yes, that’s how I watch 24 getting the 24 hour season down to 16 hours (or rather 12 or so, since the DVD’s don’t have the commercials). But I find 24 tedious and silly. For a movie I really like, I almost might want to slow it down. 
MSG still has this feature. Looking at the TV Schedule, Tonights Rangers vs Predators game is from 7 to 930 PM and The “Rangers in 60” is from 1030 to 1130 PM, followed by a complete rebroadcast of the whole game, followed by another “Rangers in 60” from 230 to 330 AM
I think back in '98, FIFA included as part of its stats package for the World Cup the time the ball was play during each match. IIRC, the times ranged from 55-65 minutes per game.
I don’t think the 11 minutes of NFL football per match surprised anybody. I’ve been watching my Niners for years and I would have guessed around 15 or so. I think the shocking statistic is the amount of time spent on commercials/promos. I’ve had a theory that the league adds more time for commercials every few years, slow enough that few would notice. The games just seem a lot slower than they did 10-15 years ago. I wonder if someone has run these stats against older, but post-merger, NFL broadcasts.
Yes it does, actually. That’s exactly what it means.
Why is there no equivalent to the 1000 page NFL playbook in soccer?
Because strategy in soccer does not depend on enacting fairly rigid set pieces, but depends (partly) on the individual players reading the game as it progresses.
So you’re saying that continual resetting doesn’t mean there’s more possibility for strategy, but soccer doesn’t have involved playbooks because the action doesn’t continually reset? You see the contradiction, right?
It’s worth pointing out that NFL football has quite a bit of tactical depth. What you’re describing in soccer sounds like tactical depth, not strategy. I’m not saying there’s no strategy in soccer. I’m just saying there isn’t much strategy in soccer compared to football. Like, for example, there is definitely strategy in backgammon, but not as much as there is in chess.
I’m just saying that they are hard to compare, and that a 1,000-page book does not mean there’s more depth in American football.
The point about preparing for the next play is an excellent one. Americans like having breaks in the action in football and baseball, because having a moment to think about what the next play ought to be is part of the fun of those games. Essentially the same effect applies in the last “minutes” of a close basketball game, too, where nearly every play is punctuated by a timeout or other stoppage.
I’m hesitant to say “Americans like having breaks because they appreciate strategy” when it seems to me that “Americans like having breaks because they have been weened on sports that stop play so the television broadcaster can sell beer and cars”.
It just seems like an historical accident brought by two factors:
- that the first nationally popular professional sport, baseball, naturally has a lot of breaks from action; and
- the United States never really had popular public broadcasting for entertainment, unlike a lot of European countries; meaning that the stations couldn’t go for 45 minutes at a time without showing any advertisements, like the BBC (for example) did.
I think those two factors have a lot more to do with why American sports have a lot of breaks from gameplay than anything having to do with the “American psyche”.
Thank god.
I’m wondering what the equivalent stats are for tennis? A few years back when Wimbledon was all serve & volley, a men’s 5-set 4-hour match would actually have the ball in play, what, 20 minutes maybe?
(Have googled, can’t find the answer!).
I have long argued this to be true. One datapoint is the popularity of televised poker, though it has waned quite a bit from its heyday.
Was televised poker ever popular in European countries?
For an even worse ratio, the Kentucky Derby lasts about 2 minutes, but there can be 90 minutes or more of coverage. I mean, I can understand having stories on the prominent horses / jockeys / owners / trainers, but there seems to be lots of filler. (not that I’m forced to watch, I just catcth the last 15 minutes)
Brian