Once again, we are dealing with the entire Sunday evening TV schedule at the mercy of a long running NFL game.
It baffles me why a game that is played in four fifteen minute quaters takes somewhere between three and four hours to play. I guess those who are fans of this mind numbing game are happy enough, but I would much rather watch Sixty Minutes on time and then on to the regularly scheduled programming.
Esp. since the regularly scheduled programming includes The Amazing Race. 
Back many years ago football games were fast. There were no commercial timeouts. The advertisers slowly snuck in more and more commercials. Now they consume as much time as the play.
The average pro game takes 3 hrs and 7 minutes. add a bit for night games where they slip in a few more commercials.
The last six minutes of this game took 27 minutes. Now they are into a fifteen minute over time period. At the pace they are moving, this means Sixty minutes Might be on about eight PM, and the Amazing Race at nine. This puts Cold Case at about midnight.
I tend to agree with gonzomax on this one. Don’t blame the NFL; blame the TV networks. The NFL has actually made rule changes to try to keep the games shorter.
Football games, along with baseball and to some extent basketball, not only for the poor slobs sitting in the stadium but for those of us following along at home, are dragging on entirely too long. It’s not suspenseful, it’s just boring. I’m getting to the point where I don’t want to watch them; I’ve got other things to do.
I’m happy to spend 2 1/2 to 3 hours watching a sports game. When they start running to 4 hours, I’m going to turn it off and deal with other things in my life. I’ve got books to read, cleaning to do, supper to fix, etc., etc., etc.
I have to admit I am not a sports fan. Any given five minutes of this game looks exactly like any other given five minutes. I do not get the appeal.
If this is actually the case, why are there so many times while the game is on where everyone is standing around and the clock is not running
The clock is not running right now, but some guy is being followed by cameras while hugging football players
So, the game is finally over. I missed the end. Thee hours and forty minutes. for a one hour game
Is this a rhetorical question?
Not to point out the obvious, but the TV networks don’t own the NFL. The NFL has the option to sell fewer commercial spots and charge more per spot. They choose not to. The length of the games (by far the longest games played by a major team league sport I can think of) is the doing of the people who run the games.
No, my friend, it is not. Why does there have to be such long stretches of game time with the clock not running? Why do the end of some plays stop the clock and others not? If comercials are the reason the game runs long, why don’t they have commercials while everyone is standing around anyway?
There are Official Time outs (3 per half per team), Injury Time outs, Challenges (used instead of a Time Out, but if successful give you back a Time Out), Official Booth review of plays, and also measuring of downs.
All these are moments where people have to stand around and wait because something else is going on in the game besides the actual game itself.
They are all reasons for why the game has to stop/pause- Commercial breaks are usually taken during these pauses, but there are still other breaks as well.
Which is the problem. There are people wearing giant, neon-orange mittens on the sidelines that signal if the network has gone to commercial. If these orange mitts suddenly went missing the world would be a better place. (Thank Og for DVR)
-Usually the clock continues if a completed play ends in bounds (person runs with the ball and is tackled in bounds, player catches the ball and is tackled in bounds, or quarterback is sacked). These plays all will keep the clock running.
However, incomplete plays (where the pass is ruled incomplete) will stop the play, and also so will any play where the player is able to run out of bounds. This becomes part of the strategy- if you have less than 10-12 mins in a quarter to play, and you’re down several scores- you do NOT want to run the ball, instead you want to focus on trying to score as quickly as possible. This means trying to execute passing plays, and having the receivers run out of bounds once they are about to go down. There is also a play clock- I believe it’s around 30 seconds or so- a play must take place during this amount of time. So if you execute a running play and run out of bounds, you’ve stopped the clock AND given your players a small time to rest, take a break, make substitutions- so that’s another reason to try to focus on plays that will stop the clock.
Because if you’re sacked or you do a running play- then you’ll still have the 30 second play clock, but it will be running simultaneous to the ACTUAL play clock which will also be running at the same time.
The opposite strategy can also be used- if you are AHEAD in the game, you don’t WANT the other team to have the ball and time to score, so you want to focus on running plays and plays that will wind the clock DOWN as much as possible. You want to eat up time by executing all of your plays after using up as much of the play clock as you can to eat away at the in-game time, AND you also can try to execute play after play after play w/o time outs or breaks in order to keep the other team’s defense in, and wear them down or force the opposing team to burn a time out just to give their players a break or to save time on the clock for themselves.
Time Management and the usage of time and the eating up of time is an inherent part of the strategy of the game. If you’re in the red zone (closer than the 10 yard line), and there’s only 20 seconds left on the clock, you’re forced to make a decision- do you focus on throwing the ball into the end zone to score- so that if you miss the throw, you will still have time left to make another attempt, or do you try to focus on running the ball in, knowing that if your runner is sacked before he scores, the play clock will wind down until the game ends. It’s a part of the coaches strategy and his assessment of his players at that point in the game to determine what plays he should call thus, and adds another layer of depth and strategy to the game.
Tangentially relevant:
Effectively, they do. Where would the NFL be without TV money?
I’m also mildly surprised to hear that it is the NFL that sells the commercials and not the networks. It’s news to me; the league gets paid by the networks and gets the commercial money too? Does the NFL also sell the ads in the sports section of my newspaper?
Friend Ro0sh
None of this explains to those of us who do not care about the minutia of the rules of a game that we do not care about why a game with a one hour time limit needs to take four hours to play.
For the same reason it takes all week (5x24 hours) for people to work a 40 hour work week.