Two questions, one objective, one more subjective.
How long is the average play in football, from snap to down. What is the longest play in football history? How does this compare with baseball (from the time the ball is hit until the play is over)?
Does “Icing the kicker,” when a time out is called in order to throw the oppsing team’s kicker out of rythmn, work? Is there some kind of statistical study done on this?
I going to bump your post since it’s an interesting question and hopefully someone will happen by with an answer. As for #2, I don’t think this really works very often, but usually the defending team has nothing to lose so…
You mean time-wise whats the longest play? Probably either an end of game multiple laterals run back, or an end of game run around like a nut job to run the clock out play. Neither one of which runs really all that long in terms of clock time. I doubt more than a minute at most.
Time in baseball is different. From the time the ball is hit til the play ends is almost always fairly short, 30 seconds or less. A line drive into the gap or the corner that rattles around a bit, with a play at the plate, followed by a play at another base would be the longest, but even that won’t be long.
What takes most of the time in both games is the time in between plays. Football usually has around 30-45 seconds between plays, unless its the end of the half/game and/or one of the teams is running a hurry up. Add in time outs(both called and official), quarter/halftime breaks, replays, 2 minute warnings, kick offs, etc etc, and thats why a game that is scheduled for an hour runs 3+. Ditto baseball. There’s a good 20-30 second or more pause between each pitch, plus a 1 1/2 minute pause between each half inning, plus another 1-2 minutes for pitching changes. 200-300 pitches per game, plus 5+ pitching changes, and again your talking a 3-4 hour game.
How could you even tell if “icing the kicker” worked or not? Just because the kicker missed doesn’t mean that the time out was the reason he did. Some former players(including a kicker or two) claim that when the other team tried to ice them, it helped them by giving them another 20-30 seconds to prepare. I’m of the group that thinks that icing is an utter waste of time, but if there’s no time left, it doesn’t really matter.
I would think an average play in football takes about 5-10 seconds from snap to whistle. You might get a play that takes over 20 seconds in very rare situations. Since baseball has no clock, it’s hard to say. If you hit a really high popup it hangs up for about 5-6 seconds.
“Icing the kicker” is something that is not subject to objective study. How can you tell if the miss is created by psychological or physical reasons? Kickers in football are never in a rhythm. They are used to coming in at odd times and having breaks before they start. It’s much different from calling a timeout in basketball before a crucial free throw. Free throw shooting does involve a lot of repetition.
My high school football coach always drilled it into our heads that the average play took just 3 seconds (obviously, the amount of time a play takes off the clock is a different matter altogether). Where he got that number from, I don’t know; but it always seemed about right. 10-15 seconds is an awfully long time for a play to last, even in the case of a downfield pass with yards after the reception. A minute-long play seems out of the question (that is, the ball being in play for that long, not that more than a minute came off the clock); an average ball runner in the NFL probably runs no more than a 6 second 40-yard dash – so even if they run all over the field, and lateral like madmen enough to cover 200 yards total, it’d still be safely less than a minute-long play.
However, sports almanacs are chock full of factoids that defy rational comprehension, so I’m fully prepared to be wrong about there being a more-than-a-minute-long play.