How many plays are run in an average football game? How many minutes of action are there in a game ? Players are exhausted on the sidelines but I suspect they don’t do 10 minutes of work with offensive and defensive platooning and playerw being shuffled in and out.
I just picked a game more or less at random from last week. In the Buffalo at Houston game, the Bills ran 61 plays from scrimmage and the Texans ran 59. If you figure maybe 110-130 plays from scrimmage in one game, with more if it’s predominantly passing and fewer if if it’s predominantly running.
Why do the players look tired? Well, a great deal of them are getting hit on ever play. Getting hit hard. By very large man. That hurts. That would tire me out. Football players are expected to run very hard on every play too.
Yes, football may be violence interrupted by committee meetings (as George Will described it), but it’s not easy. If you aren’t playing hard on every play, you can run into someone else who is on a play and then SPLAT, there goes your career.
I dont have a stopwatch but I would like to time the action from snap to tackle. I do not think it would be much. I listened to a game last week and announcer said something about 63 plays a game. He must have meant per team. Thats what got me wondering ,it seemed too few.
Football is very explosive: 0% to 100% on the second, and then back to 0%, and then bang! 100%, and 0%, and 100%. Add to that getting hit while at 100%. You get tired fast.
Soccer, for instance, is a whole different matter, you walk around, give 70%, walk around, give 90%, 10%, and once in a while 100%. It’s quite different.
Of course, my experience is from the backyard leagues, but I’ve played both for a few years each.
I remember once reading an estimate that there were 12 minutes of action (timed from snap to tackle) per game, but I have no idea where. I’ll see if I can find where that comes from.
I agree with Marly23. I did this as a kid with a Super Bowl game and came up with 12 minutes and some odd seconds.
If I record a football game on my dvr and watch it later I can fast forward through commercials, time outs, half time, and time between when a play is whistled dead and the ball is hiked on the next play.
I’ve done this a few times and can easily get through a game within 25 minutes.