But hold on, you may object, a football game is 60 minutes long, no? Well, no. The clock that counts out those 60 football minutes is not "stop-time" and is oblivious to the onset and stoppage of action on the field. The average NFL game contains about 120 actual plays, which take an average of six seconds each. That's 720 seconds of play, or 12 minutes. Meanwhile, the average NFL game in total takes three hours to play (the Super Bowl can last an hour longer). This means that a regular-season game contains 12 minutes of action, and 168 minutes of inaction, largely comprised of what Mickey Charles, CEO of
www.sportsnetwork.com, describes as "commercials, time outs, the walking around, replays, getting up off the turf, dances in the end zone and injury delays." This yields a percentage comparison of seven per cent action to 93 per cent inaction; if we were to plug these figures into what you might call the Great Sports Action-to-Inaction Index, you'd get a ratio of one to 14. For every one minute of action an NFL game provides for a fan, it inflicts 14 minutes of inaction on him or her as well.
