Ready for 11 Minutes of Football?

• Posted by Adam Warner
• on January 16th, 2010

Having some company over for the football game this afternoon? Here’s an idea. DVR the game and then start watching at 7:30 and only watch the action. You can finish with time to spare before the night game says the Journal.

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.

Well, whatever, it’s still the best sport to watch. I guess basketball has 48 full minutes of action since the clock doesn’t run when the ball’s not in play. Who cares, it’s all walking the ball up the court, 4 guys stand around, Star Player drives and gets fouled. Timeout, break for commercial. Soccer has 90 full minutes of action with no commercials. I  like the World Cup, but that’s about it. Baseball? c’mon. Football’s played on a gridiron, every field is the same size. Baseball has all kinds of different shapes and sizes. In football, the goal is to advance the pigskin into the end zone. In baseball, you try to go home (hat tip George Carlin).

If you want pure action, just watch hockey. there’s truly something happening the full 60 minutes.

But hey, in football they have cheerleaders on during all that down time, right?

If you think the networks are a little too fond of cheerleaders, you may be mistaken: In these broadcasts, only two networks showed cheerleaders at all. And when they did, they were only on camera for an average of three seconds. “We make it a point to get Dallas cheerleaders on, but otherwise, it’s not really important,” says Fred Gaudelli, NBC’s Sunday Night Football producer. “If we’re doing the Jets, I couldn’t care less.”

OK, guess not.

Whatever, it’s still way more fun to watch.

If I had one complaint, it’s the constant plugging of network shows between plays. I feel like someone implanted a chip in my brain to tell me “Chuck” debuted with a 2 hour special last Sunday. The only network that avoids that is NFL Network, but the tradeoff is you have to listen to Matt Millen for 3 hours.

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