Watching football

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Tuesday, February 15. 2022

Via Quartz:

An average professional football game lasts 3 hours and 12 minutes, but if you tally up the time when the ball is actually in play, the action amounts to a mere 11 minutes.

Posted by The Barrister in The Culture, "Culture," Pop Culture and Recreation at 16:44 | Comments (14) | Trackbacks (0)

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Nowhere is this more apparent than at a College Football game. Watch a play run out, then out comes the ref holding up the orange arm, everybody chills for 3 minutes while the commercials run. What is maddening, is that the stadiums seize this opportunity to run advertisements on the Jumbotron, or some stupid simplistic game that everybody is supposed to watch, and so on. You can't even gab with your neighbor, it's too loud.

I finally gave up about 5 years ago, even though I quite liked the whole game day / tailgating / stroll to the stadium / see the game ritual. It reduces the game itself to only one element of a kind of relentless multi-tasking that inundates your senses. Plus, the season tickets cost a bomb now, to pay for all these new stadiums. I figured out I had too many more pleasant alternatives.

#1 Aggie on 2022-02-15 16:51 (Reply)

Yea, the in-stadium experience is horrible. It's amazing to see the flow in energy happen over and over again: big play --> crowd excited --> 3 minute TV timeout --> excitement dissipated.

Worse, actually stopping game for those 3 minute timeouts is completely unnecessary. The TV broadcast doesn't have to be in sync with the actual game (i.e., tape delay to create the slot, time compress to catch back up)

#1.1 OldCurmudgeon on 2022-02-15 19:51 (Reply)

It is in the current design of the game, and not just for commercial purposes. Each play is brief but very intense physical effort in terms of speed or strength. To make the plays they do you have to rotate people out when you can - such as wide receivers going to the bench of a play after the full sprint of a deep route while banging into defenders or linemen digging into an opponent with arms and legs. If you can't match that intensity, you will get beaten. It's another advantage big college programs or deep pro teams have. They can have their best players in on 80-90% of the snaps with a credible backup.

The extreme of this would be something like Sumo wrestling or the sprints and field events in a track meet. Everything comes down to a few 10-30 second bursts.

The other team sports aren't different. Baseball players stand around endlessly except for the pitcher and catcher, which is why it's tough to watch 9-year-olds, throwing their gloves in the air in the outfield or looking at the planes overhead. Hockey rotates through three lines of players throughout the game. Soccer is a lot of standing around and edging into position interspersed with explosive moments. Basketball is more continuous, but players don't usually put in more than 35 minutes on the court in a game, and even then a lot of the movement is active without being intense. Tennis? Watch a match and count the actually seconds of intense work and add them up. Golf? Walking with intermittent focused effort. Weight lifting? Swimming? You want sustained calorie-burn? Climb the Whites or the Smokies.

Unless you are talking about a distance sport like cross-country, they are all like this. And they can make you plenty worn out even with most of the hour hovering, bouncing lightly, with full-focus on anticipation interspersed with explosive trained movements.

#2 Assistant Village Idiot on 2022-02-15 17:49 (Reply)

>even then a lot of the movement is active without being intense.

TV has ruined basketball. You can't press / play up-tempo anymore because you can't exhaust the other team's guards. Worse, the competing meta-strategy focuses on long jump shots...to the point where a layup is considered a bad play for the offense(!)

#2.1 OldCurmudgeon on 2022-02-16 09:50 (Reply)

Hockey games do not stop or even slow down when the players from the various lines rotate on or off the ice.

One player leaps off the ice, and nearly simultaneously another player leaps on, meanwhile all the other players are bashing each other and racing around the ice at stupid fast speeds.

There is no comparison between hockey's constant action and footballs constant inaction.

#2.2 Fred Z on 2022-02-16 19:52 (Reply)

And they say baseball is long and boring

#3 Tino on 2022-02-15 18:39 (Reply)

You want long? Have you heard of CRICKET? A standard game of cricket is played over 5 DAYS! (30 hours of play). And at the end there's no guarantee of a winner.

From what I understand of American football, strategies can change with each stoppage of play. So it is with cricket. The bowler might change his ball delivery, and the fielders move to positions based on some plan, every time a ball is bowled.

However, as a TV event, cricket is ideal. At the end of every over, (6 balls bowled at at batter), bowling switches to the opposite direction, and the fielders and umpires rearrange. It's the perfect time to insert one or two adverts. This happens about a dozen times an hour.

#3.1 Tom Appleton on 2022-02-15 22:28 (Reply)

A baseball game lasts 3 hours, but the play is continuous, except for rare timeouts and the change of sides. The pace is leisurely because it’s usually played in hot summer afternoons.

Even at the best, there’s only 60 actual minutes of play in a 3 1/2 football game.

#4 bob sykes (Link) on 2022-02-15 20:09 (Reply)

Three or four seconds is a long ass time in football.

#5 ccoffer on 2022-02-15 20:58 (Reply)

If you're measuring only snap-to-whistle time, a football game is almost absurdly short. However, especially at the NFL level, the play begins not at the snap, but at the time the offensive huddle is broken. It's akin to the maneuver portion of a linear tactics battle. The offense takes a formation, the defense reacts, the offense adjusts, the defense counters in a cycle that may have four or five iterations in the ten to 15 seconds allowed. Both sides are trying to both optimize their position while concealing their intentions from the other. There's a reason that Football has always been a big deal at West Point.
A modern offense may have as many as three or four plays called coming out of the huddle, with the quarterback making the final call just before the snap (or even later in today's run/pass option schemes).

Assuming that this time is somehow not part of the game is just silly.

#6 Another Guy named Dan on 2022-02-16 07:16 (Reply)

Exactly. The offensive player in motion, the defensive sets and adjustments, all a huge part of the game.

#6.1 DrTorch (Link) on 2022-02-16 15:38 (Reply)

Even when I was a kid playing football I never was interested in watching it. It's boring unless you are vested in the team some how. But it is one of the funnest sports to play. While you're on the field it doesn't seem slow at all.

If you want non-stop intense action watch NASCAR. On its surface it looks boring (I thought so too), but once you understand the intricacies, the sport is hard to look away from. I just don't have 3 hours on a Sunday anymore to watch. Before I had kids we'd watch every lap every Sunday.

#7 jack walter on 2022-02-16 07:33 (Reply)

I discovered this when I began recording mid-afternoon games for later watching. Would sit down to watch and started fast forwarding through the commercials. Then discovered that my skip ahead button would allow me to jump from the end of a play to the roughly the snap of the ball for the next play. At the end of the game I would either quit watching, if the outcome was not in doubt, or would watch the final 2 minutes at regular speed.

Average time to watch a full game, of actual football plays, was 20-30 minutes.

#8 steve walsh on 2022-02-16 08:29 (Reply)

From Nov 24, 1963

Giants vs Cardinals.

Look how the game has changed.

50 minutes.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gOiW2kLbw1s

#9 feeblemind on 2022-02-16 19:01 (Reply)

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Tuesday, February 15. 2022

Watching football