Sunday, August 18, 2013 Regular season games must end within two hours. Constitutional amendment 1.
One attack on football is that its games take longer than ever. That's true but how does their length compare to the length of baseball games? Let's look at the Major Baseball League (MBL) and the National Football League (NFL).
Slate SEPT. 12 2012
How daytime football games became primetime football games.
By John Koblin
... In Week 1 this year, games averaged 3 hours and 14 minutes. That was about six minutes longer than last year's opening-week games...
For all of last season, according to the Elias Sports Bureau, the average game lasted 3:07. That was a minute longer than 2010, which was a minute longer than 2009, which was two minutes longer than 2008...
According to Elias, it was a ponderous 3:10 in 2002, and a brisk 2:59 in 1992...
a football broadcast consists of 11 minutes of actual football, surrounded by nearly three hours of everything else. And that ratio of padding to action hasn't kept the games from being wildly popular television programs.
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The NFL championship game, aka Super Bowl, is not typical. It is a bloated media event with an obscenely long half time interruption and flashy new TV commercials sprinkled throughout the game to attract non-football viewers. Everyone knows that it is extra long.
Last season's game, played February 3, 2013, took 4:14 (including power failure interruption). To me that's surprisingly shorter than I had expected. The score was San Francisco 49ers 31 - Baltimore Ravens 34, so there was plenty of actual football action. Game one of the current Boston - Detroit semi final series took 3:56 to produce one run for Detroit and one hit for Boston.
How about a few more recent NFL championship games:
New York Giants 21 vs. New England Patriots 17
Sunday, February 5, 2012
Duration 3:23
Pittsburgh Steelers 25 vs. Green Bay Packers 31
Sunday, February 6, 2011
No time given.
New Orleans Saints 31 vs. Indianapolis Colts 17
Sunday, February 7, 2010
Duration 3:14
Source: pro-football-reference.com
So the most recent NFL championship game time of 4:14 is an aberration because of the power failure that interrupted the game. But even that is not so bad compared to the 1-0 four minutes short of four hours for that Boston - Detroit atrocity.
Game Changers: Picking up the game's pace
By Alden Gonzalez MLB.com 06/14/10
The average time to complete a nine-inning game in the 1970s -- not including on-field delays -- was two hours and 30 minutes. That increased to an average of 2:57 in the 10-year span from 2000-09. Through Thursday, this year's league average was 2:51, according to the Elias Sports Bureau.
In the playoffs, game times have been longer. Last season, nine-inning regular-season games lasted an average of 2:52, while in the postseason, that number jumped to 3:30, according to STATS LLC...
But almost everyone is cautious about tinkering too much with a game that has been so relevant for so long.
| Year | MLB | NYY-BOS | Postseason |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2000 | 2:58 | 3:05 | 3:25 |
| 2001 | 2:54 | 3:02 | 3:11 |
| 2002 | 2:52 | 3:08 | 3:25 |
| 2003 | 2:46 | 3:08 | 3:06 |
| 2004 | 2:47 | 3:12 | 3:15 |
| 2005 | 2:46 | 3:10 | 3:02 |
| 2006 | 2:48 | 3:28 | 3:08 |
| 2007 | 2:51 | 3:31 | 3:26 |
| 2008 | 2:50 | 3:18 | 3:13 |
| 2009 | 2:52 | 3:30 | 3:30 |
| 2010** | 2:51 | 3:38 | N/A |
Length:
NFL 2011: 3:07
MBL 2009: 2:52
Wall Street Journal
11 Minutes of Action
By DAVID BIDERMAN
Updated Jan. 15, 2010
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...
The most surprising finding of The Journal's study—that the average game has just 10 minutes and 43 seconds of actual playing time—has been corroborated by other researchers. In November 1912, Indiana University's C.P. Hutchins, the school's director of physical training, observed a game, stopwatch in hand, between two independent teams. He counted 13 minutes, 16 seconds of play. During last week's Wild Card games, Mr. Crippen, the football researcher, dissected the broadcasts and found about 13 minutes, 30 seconds of action.
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Wall Street Journal
In America's Pastime, Baseball Players Pass A Lot of Time
By STEVE MOYER
Updated July 16, 2013
By WSJ calculations, a baseball fan will see 17 minutes and 58 seconds of action over the course of a three-hour game. This is roughly the equivalent of a TED Talk, a Broadway intermission or the missing section of the Watergate tapes. A similar WSJ study on NFL games in January 2010 found that the average action time for a football game was 11 minutes. So MLB does pack more punch in a battle of the two biggest stop-and-start sports. By seven minutes.
Baseball is remembered for its moments of action, and it is no secret that such moments are fleeting. But how much actual action takes place in a baseball game? Geoff Foster has the breakdown.
The WSJ reached this number by taking the stopwatch to three different games and timing everything that happened... This may be generous. If we'd cut the action definition down to just the time when everyone on the field is running around looking for something to do (balls in play and runner advancement attempts), we'd be down to 5:47.
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Action:
NFL: 11
MBL: 6 or 18
Yippie for baseball! Everything is A-OK! Yeah, if you embrace the higher number (18) and ignore the lower (6). But even with 18 minutes of action baseball is at a disadvantage compared to football.
The nature of the action in football is dramatically and violently different. Ninety percent of what passes for action in baseball is two guys playing catch. At most there are 13 players on the field at once, usually ten. On most plays most players on the field do nothing.
In football 22 players are engaged in pretty much every play. Almost all of that engagement is potentially violent and thus more compelling. Americans express their preference for football by attending and watching on TV. See recent posts:
Sunday, October 6, 2013 Baseball v. Football: do you really want to do this?
Monday, October 7, 2013 Baseball v. Football: MBL tournament v. NFL early season attendance in Oakland.
The NFL and the National Basketball Association (NBA) are constantly tinkering with rules to improve the entertainment value of their product, usually by favoring scoring and improving officiating. The MBL instead has launched an inquisition into performance enhancing drugs (PED), including steroids, and we are now enduring tournament games with too many strike outs, too few runs that take too long to play.
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