Delay of Game

There was an interesting article in the WSJ today by David Biderman that provided a breakdown of the content of an average NFL game.

Now, I had suspected that out of the 60 minutes of game clock, that there would be a lot of dead time e.g. how the clock keeps ticking after running plays are stopped in-bounds. Still, just less than 11 minutes of actual game-play was a little surprising to me at first blush.

"According to a Wall Street Journal study of four recent broadcasts, and similar estimates by researchers, the average amount of time the ball is in play on the field during an NFL game is about 11 minutes.

In other words, if you tally up everything that happens between the time the ball is snapped and the play is whistled dead by the officials, there's barely enough time to prepare a hard-boiled egg. In fact, the average telecast devotes 56% more time to showing replays.

So what do the networks do with the other 174 minutes in a typical broadcast? Not surprisingly, commercials take up about an hour. As many as 75 minutes, or about 60% of the total air time, excluding commercials, is spent on shots of players huddling, standing at the line of scrimmage or just generally milling about between snaps. In the four broadcasts The Journal studied, injured players got six more seconds of camera time than celebrating players. While the network announcers showed up on screen for just 30 seconds, shots of the head coaches and referees took up about 7% of the average show."

Looking at these numbers has to be pretty disheartening to regular viewers who whittle away whole Sundays. When I am watching football, I'm often doing something else at the same time, usually cooking, which cuts down on my NFL-coach-potato guilt level. But to those fans who go to the games, that's quite a price to be paying for 11 minutes of action.

It begs the question, though: How does football dead time compare to other major sports? In basketball with a 24-second shot clock, a lot of time is spent passing the ball and setting up plays before a shot is attempted. Same thing with hockey. Both of those sports have a 60-minute clock in the professional game. Soccer is another serial time-waster, even with longer matches --- 90 minutes, plus so-called "stoppage time" which is a referee-determined add-on of how much time has been spent on injuries, substitutions, etc. --- that often come down to about 5 serious shots on goal. This is an American viewer's oft-bemoaned example of why soccer doesn't have much of a following in this country.

Tens of millions of fans, however, go to Major League Baseball games every year to sit through an indeterminate-timed 9 innings. Indeed, sitting for 3 hours, watching practice swings, bullpen sessions, warm-up pitches, bubble gum chewing and arguments between managers and umpires, while waiting for 27 players to be called "out" is deemed the American past-time. Then again, at our house, it gives a heck of a reason for a nice spring/summer/fall weekend nap when a game is on.