FOX borrowed the concept of putting the score and time on the screen from I believe Sky TV’s practice of doing so for English Premier League football matches. After all, for a football (soccer) match, there aren’t commercial and you really do want to know the time and the score all the time.
I remember in the late 1970s when CBS was the first network to flash graphics that would read “3rd and 6” before each play. The announcer for the game (I believe it was Vin Scully) said that the network added it because the hearing impaired had a difficult time of following football games on TV.