How long do football games last on TV

For five months of the year, the National Football League dominates Sundays in the United States; it’s more popular than church.

The NFL’s popularity is all the more remarkable when you inspect the fare it has to offer each week on television. 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.

Part of the discrepancy has to do with the basic rules of American football. Unlike hockey or basketball, the 60-minute game clock in football can run even when the ball is not in play. That means a lot of game time is spent standing around or huddling up before each play begins.

The 11 minutes of action was famously calculated a few years ago by the Wall Street Journal. Its analysis found that an average NFL broadcast spent more time on replays (17 minutes) than live play. The plurality of time (75 minutes) was spent watching players, coaches, and referees essentially loiter on the field.

An average play in the NFL lasts just four seconds.

Of course, watching football on TV is hardly just about the game; there are plenty of advertisements to show people, too. The average NFL game includes 20 commercial breaks containing more than 100 ads. The Journal’s analysis found that commercials took up about an hour, or one-third, of the game.

Football’s stop-and-go nature makes it particularly prime for commercials, unlike soccer, which forces broadcasters to creatively insert ads during the 45 minutes of continuous play in each half. Broadcasts of NFL games in Europe, incidentally, include far fewer commercials.

How long does a football game last?

A football game consists of 4 quarters that are 15 minutes long each. This is true for both the NFL and College football games, one of those places where they are the same. So a football game is an hour long (4 x 15min = 1hr), right? Not so quick. You have to add in the few minutes between each quarter and the 20 minutes for a college halftime /12 minutes for a professional halftime. But still, that’s only about 1 1/2 hours. How long do football games last?

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Well, the time clock in football stops all the time. It stops when a player runs with the ball off the field. It stops between switching teams who are on offense. It stops at time outs. It stops at injuries. Oh, and if the game is televised, then you’ll see the little guy in the red shirt come out and stop the clock and the game for commercials to be played on TV too. In college, it even stops when a team makes a first down! Geez!

With all of that, the length of the game is generally just over 3 hours. This might seem crazy but think of all the time you have to get a beverage during the game without missing a thing!!

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There’s a touchdown. That means a timeout is coming. Here comes a replay review. Add on another couple of minutes. The offense just made a first down. So the clock stops. And uh oh, here comes that official in the red hat onto the field, the dreaded indication another TV timeout is coming.

You’re not imagining it: College football games are taking longer. And not a small amount longer.

But the television networks and their annoying timeouts aren’t to blame. Nor are the long replay reviews. It’s not even the epic weather delays, because even if you take those out the average college football game has lengthened by four minutes since 2017, now up to an average of 3 hours, 22 minutes, even though the number of plays is going down.

“Four minutes is a lot,” said NCAA coordinator of officials Steve Shaw, who tracks the data. “The why is very complex.”

Perhaps, but there is one main, overriding reason why game times have gone up so much lately: passing. The evolution of college football offenses toward being more pass-heavy leads to more scoring, which results in clock stoppages but also more first downs and more incompletions — although incompletions are also down because teams are becoming better at passing, thus leading to all those first downs, touchdowns and field goals. It’s not that teams are passing more, it’s that they’re good at it.

FBS-wide per-game averages (both teams)

Meanwhile, the number of running plays, which inherently means more times the clock will run after a play, has gone down. There were 79.0 rushes per game in 2002, then 77.6 in 2012 and 74.6 so far this season.

There’s no evidence this is going away. Passing works. And college football already has gone through a litany of tweaks to clock rules through the years, with a couple of more quick fixes perhaps coming. (More on that later.) But the length of games is a looming issue that everyone involved, including the television networks, is interested in exploring.

“In a perfect world, games could always be 3:15 to 3:30 in length, that would be the wheelhouse,” said Nick Dawson, ESPN senior vice president for programming. “I would say the majority, anecdotally, fits in that window. But certainly, there are exceptions to the rule. It’s hard because there’s a balance. If it’s a great competitive game, 56-52 game that runs four hours, nobody’s complaining, right? If it’s a 60-10 game that takes four hours, then you run into the issues.”

But Dawson said there’s a concern about holding the interest of young viewers, which is why he would be open to exploring more creative ideas, such as more advertising while the game is on air, in exchange for fewer TV timeouts.

“From a TV perspective, I don’t know that we’ve seen a negative impact yet based on game length, based on viewership. But I do think we have enough data on just viewing trends and fandom trends and younger demos to understand that this could be an issue moving forward; it could be an issue in the future,” Dawson said. “Is there a time now for all the stakeholders involved across college football to come together and try to figure some solutions to maybe avoid a problem before it becomes a real problem?”

NFL games do a better job of neatly fitting in their time windows, but college football has a couple of notable differences. Halftime in college is 20 minutes, eight minutes longer than the NFL, but there isn’t much clamor to shorten that at the college level.

“I’ll have band directors coming to burn my house down,” Shaw said. “There’s a pageantry component in college football.”

Average game times

Another is replay reviews: The NFL keeps it to coaches’ challenges and the final two minutes of the half, while college allows the game to stop at any time. While that may lead to some games during which the stoppages seem interminable (and unnecessary), the data shows that on average only two replay stoppages happen per game, with an average delay of two minutes. So that’s four minutes per game, a number that has gone down through the years as replay has become more efficient.

And yet the length of the game has gone up. The average game time, not counting weather delays, was 3:17 only nine years ago. That has increased to 3:28 last year and 3:32 this year. (The number of 3:22 that Shaw cited doesn’t include weather delays, but he says the basic trend is the same.)

The NCAA and its rules committee have tried various tweaks through the years:

• In 2008, they made drastic clock changes, that after an out-of-bounds play, once the ball is ready to play, officials restart the clock, other than the final two minutes of halves. That had a significant impact, according to Shaw.

• In 2017, they decided to make halftime 20 minutes without exceptions. Some teams had been asking for 24-minute halves for a ceremony, for example, or playing loose with the 20 minutes. Now the clock is supposed to start once the first half ends and the second-half kickoff happens on time.

• In 2018, they went to a 40-second clock after a touchdown or kickoff, like any other play, something they had been lax on.

• In 2021, they adjusted replay reviews to check the game clock so they only would look at a play for the final two minutes of the first half and the final four minutes of the game. Then they cut it to the final two minutes of the second half for this year.

But with games still going longer, a couple of more options are on the table:

• Treating incompletions like plays that go out of bounds: The clock stops, but once the ball is set and ready to play, the clock re-starts. Shaw said that’s roughly 10 seconds each time it happens. This could hurt offenses trying to catch up, but if they don’t want to lose time on incompletions, they would know to get to the line and be ready.

• The other is no longer stopping the clock on first downs. But Shaw thinks that won’t have a big impact because the officials have been doing a good job of spotting the ball and moving the chains quickly, after which point the clock re-starts.

“Even though you think, ‘Man you’d save 10 seconds every first down,’ you really probably won’t,” Shaw said. “That probably won’t have as big an impact as re-starting it after incompletions.”

Even that has an asterisk. Shaw pointed out this stat: In 2021, FBS teams set an all-time record for best completion percentage. So that also could make it difficult to speed it up.

“The philosophy has been that we want to work on the edges of the game,” Shaw said. “But we’re kind of at a point where we’ve squeezed it, all the juice is out. There might be something that someone can come with creatively. But we’ve kind of squeezed all the juice out.”

Average plays per game

That’s where TV timeouts could come into play. Right now they average about 2 minutes, 30 seconds to three minutes per break, and usually, there is an average of three breaks per quarter. (It depends on how many stoppages there are for scoring, injuries, replays, etc.)

Yes, there are contractual rules about how many timeouts need to be reached per game. But that has not gone up “dramatically” through the years, said SEC associate commissioner Mark Womack, who tracks game lengths and other logistics for the conference.

Womack doesn’t blame TV timeouts for why games take longer, using an example of two recent SEC games that were on the SEC Network: Georgia hosting Samford was 2 hours, 51 minutes, while South Carolina hosting Georgia State took 3, 43 minutes. The Georgia-Samford game was shortened into a 12-minute fourth quarter, but that’s only three minutes of game action.

Certainly, many national games, such as SEC on CBS games, have longer ad breaks. But that doesn’t explain the games on smaller tiers that also go long.

“TV probably has the same elements to it then (in 2017) that it has now. Those aren’t changed dramatically,” Womack said. “As a matter of fact, we’ve probably tightened them up by using our timeout clock. The fan looks at it and says, ‘Guys this TV timeout is going on forever, they take five-minute breaks.’ Well no they don’t, and you can see it now.”

But ESPN is open to ideas, according to Dawson. Advertising while the game is on — between plays, coming out of timeouts, etc. — has been tried but could be expanded. This is something that could happen right away, rather than wait until the TV contracts come up, but it’s not a switch that can just be flipped.

“The challenge is you’ve got to get all partners on the same page: The advertisers, do they like that, are they willing to pay for that. The viewer, do we think the viewers like that. There’s a lot of dynamics there that are going to have to come together around creating solutions,” Dawson said. “But I think we probably need to do a better job of coming together as a group of stakeholders and putting ideas on the table, and finding ways to test them, to see hey this one doesn’t work, but maybe this one does, and helps to chip away at potential issues down the road.”

That’s because there’s a realization that pass-heavy offenses aren’t going away. Georgia Tech is a stark example: Four years ago, in the last year it used the option, its average game length was 3 hours, 7 minutes. Last season, the Yellow Jackets averaged 3 hours, 30 minutes.

Everyone is clear they don’t want the game to be homogenized where everyone runs the same kind of offense. That’s part of the “charm of college football,” as Dawson put it. But there’s an examination on what could be done, especially with College Football Playoff expansion coming, to avoid having games become a long slog.

College football has evolved. The clock rules, and other things, may have to adapt.

“It is a tricky balance,” Dawson said. “Where can you find things where you can legislate, through rule-making, to speed up the process of the game, while still allowing for the creativity and the uniqueness of each individual program, each individual philosophy, on offense and defense.”

(Illustration: Sean Reilly /The Athletic; Photos: Getty Images)

How long does football last on TV?

How long do live NFL games last?

How long does a college football game last on TV?