[QUOTE=K364]
(The commentators talk) about their own job. Whether or not it’s a cush job. Travelling, who gets the sleeper seat.
[/QUOTE]
It’s not just golf.
Play-by-play and “color” commentators have been increasingly doing this during the most minimal breaks between activity on the field/course, and sometimes while action is taking place. It’s a natural evolution from sports news anchors being encouraged to consider themselves entertainers who people are tuning in to see (with actual sports news being an equal or lesser consideration).
I will watch segments of baseball games on ESPN with the sound off for this reason. Golf would be a natural for audio-less viewing - just play music of your choice, or nothing at all.
Hey, when Europe produces a Tiger Woods then you can prove how above it all you are.
I hear you on the lack of iron ccverage but let’s face it: Short wedges, saves and putters are what wins the day and people like watching guys smashing drives. Add in the par 3s and guys digging out of rough trouble, lt leaves little time for the approach shots.
It’s literally 60 minutes of action, each quarter being composed of 15 minutes of active play cut up into plays that last seconds. An overtime game of course can have up to 15 additional minutes of action.
So the comment about 11 minutes of action is mathematically inaccurate.
Baseball, on the other hand, that’s a game with no guaranteed amount of active play besides playing catch.
But the clock runs for much of the game between plays. So in reality, while 11 minutes may be a bit of hyperbole, it’s no where near 60 min. of actual action.
Of course, if you are talking REAL football, then we have 90 min. of action played in, yeah, you guessed it, 90 min. Plus 15 for halftime and it’s quite a manageable 1:49 or so total (added time at the end of each half for any stoppages like substitutions).
Probably contributed to my dislike for the guy. In addition to thinking him an asshole, I got tired of watching him stalk around putts for minutes. Pretty much what FF was invented for! :smack: And if he was in/near the lead, no other golfer existed for the cameras.
But I like watching golf on TV. I often will record the whole round, and then play it through, switching between play to FF1 and FF2. Can’t stand Johnny Miller, and Jim Nantz has yet to say anything I was interested in. Recording the entire round, the repeated “How we got here” sections are unnecessary.
Two things I often think - I hate it when they switch to some guy you haven’t seen all day, because you know he’s going to hit a miraculous shot. I mean, it is cool to see the shots, but it just strikes me as weird, “Here’s a guy we’ve been ignoring all day, watch him for 10 seconds, then we’ll plunge him back into oblivion.”
I’ve often thought one of the saddest positions in all of pro sports is to be the guy having a bad round while your playing partner is winning a tournament. It can be so weird - they’ll show every shot of one of a pair, and you’ll have to really work to figure out who is playing with him!
And, for the record, my wife watches no pro sports on TV other than the Chicago marathon, and pro golf. She rarely golfs (I think we went to the range together once this year.) So there must be something about it that appeals to some folk other than rabid golfers.
This is an issue I think they need to solve - who to focus on. They seem to always narrow it down to the top two any given day. Whereas I’ve seen it where the top guy on Saturday gets all the coverage, but then craps out early on Sunday and you never see him again - at all. Unless they choose to use the narrative of “oh sad, watch this melt-down”. I mean, c’mon, maybe he ends up 4 back and still earns $350,000, but they make it sound like he’s on his deathbed.
I can’t remember the tournament, but once they spent all Sunday focused on the leader, but someone who wasn’t even in the mix came from behind in the last 3 holes and won. They hadn’t covered him at all during the day. They ended up scrambling in the last 3 minutes of the coverage to find some tape on him.
I sure don’t know what the solution is, but they really need to spread the coverage around more.
Many (most?) plays stop the clock when they end. And you have at most 40 seconds between plays before a delay of game penalty or a timeout is required (either of which stops the clock). So when the clock is running between plays, it isn’t for long.
Ironically, it’s soccer that keeps the clock running the whole time, even when people are getting in position, a player is hurt (or pretending to be), a penalty occurs, etc. Soccer is a very poor example to contrast, that 90 minutes keeps going during things that would stop the clock in American football. And it seems arbitrary how much extra time is tacked on at the end of a half. Certainly no guarantee of action for 90 minutes.
You definitely have much longer periods of activity in soccer, I’ll give you that. The action doesn’t pause anywhere nearly as much. It’s more like hockey or basketball in that sense.
No football fan here, but I believe the clock stops only on a time out or incomplete pass. Possibly a penalty. For a run/completed pass, clock keeps a rolling.
If we figure a play lasts 5 seconds, and they use up the full 35 seconds remaining, that’s close to a 7:1 ration of inaction to action.
Look at it another way. The clock lasts 1 hour - the average game 3. By that measure, you’ve got a 2:1 ratio of nongame to game time.
I used to be a big NHL/Bears fan. Watched every minute of every game in their superbowl season. The following season, when they weren’t as good, something clicked and I noticed how much time was spent picking themselves up, walking back to the huddle, etc. My perception changed such that I went from being a big fan, to being bored.
Rugby is another sport with more of a running clock.
I used to enjoy track and field meets (in person), because there was almost always SOMETHING going on - a race, jumping events, throwing events…
Not to derail this Golf thread, but if you google “how much action is in a football game” you will find multiple references to the 11-minute number - they are counting “action” as time from when the ball is snapped to when the whistle is blown at the end of the play (usually just a few seconds at a time, followed by a minute or so of players getting into position for the next play). I think only Hockey and Basketball have action that closely matches the game clock.
A lot of how golf is covered now is a reaction to the old days.
When I was growing up in the 60s and 70s, golf coverage consisted of holes 15, 16, 17 and 18, with the 14th green in some places (an example was at Pebble for the Crosby). You got maybe two hours of coverage, watching the last 10 or so groups come through those holes. With such limited selection, it was easy to show only the shots of the leaders, and you often saw drives, approach shots, and all the around-the-green activity.
Then, in 1973, Johnny Miller won the U.S. Open at Oakmont with a final round 63 (the first such 63 shot in a major), which was completed before ABC even got on the air. So we spent the entire coverage watching the world’s best golfers fail to catch Miller. IIRC, they didn’t even have TAPE of most of Miller’s shots. And that changed EVERYTHING (admittedly at a slow pace). Coverage started showing more holes on the back nine, and starting earlier. Eventually, roving cameras allowed them to show coverage on the front nine, and that allowed them to schedule even more coverage. Finally, they got to where they could show all 18 holes (usually reserved for a major championship), and would cover all or most of the last pairing’s round. CBS still does this with The Masters. Eventually, of course, we got extended coverage on companion channels, so that now, for many tournaments, you can see everything all day long on Saturday and Sunday, and large amounts of Thursday and Friday.
This comes at a cost, of course. You now have too many shots to show in the time allotted, unless you just cut from shot to shot to shot, without any build-up or stage-setting. The tension now between showing someone stalking a birdie putt, and showing the three putts that happened during that “dead” time is part of what a producer and director have to decide how to handle. It’s even worse if the tournament has several people in the running. I recall the year that Raymond Floyd won the US Open at Shinnecock Hills (1986), there was a huge pile-up of players, some going backwards, some treading water, some making a run at it seemingly. But they hadn’t shown a single shot of Floyd’s until he birdied 11 to tie for the lead; all of a sudden he became important enough to show, but they missed 10 holes of his final round. Epic fail.
In the old days, of course, if you were the third-round leader, and you crapped out in the final round, yeah, we saw you making bad shots. There weren’t enough options to avoid showing you. This was especially true if you were Nicklaus, Palmer, Watson, Miller, or one of the other anointed ones. Now, it’s just noise that gets glossed over.
Man, I had forgotten how limited coverage used to be - to the last few holes. And I know the Masters is its own category, but wasn’t it relatively recent that we first saw the front nine at Augusta?
I have been a pretty ardent golfer for more than 4 decades, and even I am somewhat surprised at the amount of coverage there can be on a Sunday. Just sitting through the leaders’ 4+ hour round requires some endurance/dedication. More than once, I’ve set a recording, and when I watch it, I see the leaders aren’t scheduled to tee off for some time. Is there any other single sporting event that regularly offers lengthier broadcasts than a Sunday golf tournament? Besides something like the Olympics?
Re: limited action time, I believe baseball is ridiculously short, if you consider the time the ball is in play. Of course, the purist will regale you of the drama of a shortstop taking a step to his left… :rolleyes:
The only time the clock keeps running is when the person with the ball is downed in-bounds. Every other situation stops the clock. So the clock is stopped when a score is made, or a person goes out of bounds (either on a run or pass play), a penalty is called, an injury occurs, a timeout is called, a ball goes out of bounds in a fumble or kick, a half or quarter ends, a kickoff/punt return is completed, or a review is made (either with a coach’s challenge or when officials decide it’s needed). Literally every play that doesn’t end in a player being downed in-bounds should stop the clock.
I can think of only 4 situations where the clock keeps running… A running play ends with the runner being tackled in-bounds, a receiver catches the ball and gains possession before being tackled in-bounds, the quarterback is sacked, or the quarterback “knees” the ball to intentionally run out the clock.
The passage of time is pretty important in football, and referred to as “clock management”. Coaches are often credited with either good or poor clock management skills based on how favorably they manipulate the time. Sometimes an entire down is abandoned on an intentional missed pass (usually in the form of a “spike” to stop the clock).
This is all a very far cry from the idea that the clock is always running in American football and so the time between plays saps up all the play time. That’s just not true. I don’t know of any exact figures for the average amount of clock time in a game being wasted when the clock is running between plays but I doubt it’s anywhere close to the 80%+ being alleged. The 11 minute playtime “stat” seems to trace back to one Wall Street Journal article rather than a real study. So the actual time isn’t proven from what I see.
There’s also the argument that setting up the lines for football is still action even before the snap, since players are physically engaged at that point even if there’s no contact between opposing players; it’s not like they’re standing around waiting. I’m curious what a real study would show.
Not true anymore in the NFL. In the NFL, while the clock will stop with a ball going out of bounds, it re-starts upon placement of the ball, except during the last 2 min. of the first half, and the last 5 min. of the second half.
So the only true clock stoppages during the rest of the game (other than for scores, post-score plays, and change of possession) come when a pass is incomplete.
I think college has adopted some form of this rule, too.
Surely there’s gotta be a few of them - off the top of my head all four tennis majors have coverage on ESPN with anywhere from six to nine hours’ live coverage a day during the first round, when there’s a lot more games to cover than for successive rounds. Or they’ll show four or five live hours’ coverage early in the day and then a couple more hours’ taped shit in the evening.
