An NFL game runs sixty minutes on the clock. The ball is actually in play for about eleven of them. Everything else, and there is a lot of everything else, is why a Super Bowl swallows most of your evening.
Coming from soccer, this took me a while to understand. I expected ninety minutes and a bit of stoppage time, the way a football match (soccer, to a US reader) works. Three and a half hours for an hour of game did not add up, until it clicked that in American football the clock and the action are two different things.
The clock is not a stopwatch
The rulebook is clear about the length of a game:
NFL rulebook, Rule 4, Section 1, Article 1. The length of the game is 60 minutes, divided into four periods of 15 minutes each.
Sixty minutes, then. The catch is that those sixty minutes are a clock, not a stopwatch on the action. In soccer the clock simply runs. In American football it starts and stops constantly, and it keeps ticking through long spells when nothing is happening at all.
The ball is live only from the snap, when it is put into play, to the whistle that ends the play. That is around four seconds. Then both teams line up again, and the rulebook gives them a forty-second play clock to do it. The game clock is often still running through that reset, so game-time and real-time pull apart quickly.
It also stops for its own reasons: an incomplete pass, a player stepping out of bounds, a score, a timeout, the two-minute warning near the end of each half. Every stoppage is a door for an advert.
Where the other three hours go
Add it up and the actual football is a sliver of the broadcast. A Wall Street Journal study once timed the whole thing.
| In a typical three-hour-plus broadcast | Time |
|---|---|
| Players, coaches and officials between plays | about 75 min |
| Commercials | about 60 min |
| Replays | about 17 min |
| The ball actually in play | about 11 min |
Source: Wall Street Journal study, 2010. The figure is fifteen years old and counts only snap-to-whistle, so a study drawing the line elsewhere would land somewhere different. The proportion is the durable part, not the decimal.
More than a hundred plays are packed into that sliver, each a few seconds long. That is the rhythm of the sport, a short violent burst and then a reset, over and over.
Why the Super Bowl adds another hour
A regular game averages a little over three hours. The Super Bowl stretches closer to four, and the extra time is not football.
Start with the interval, which the rulebook fixes for a normal game:
NFL rulebook, Rule 4, Section 1, Article 3. Between the second and third periods, there shall be an intermission of 13 minutes.
Thirteen minutes is the standard. The Super Bowl halftime runs to roughly half an hour, because a stadium-sized music production has to be built and cleared. Add a vast build-up, adverts that cost millions, and a trophy ceremony in no hurry, and the extra hour is accounted for without a single additional snap. If you are planning an evening around it, I have laid out the actual timings in how to watch the Super Bowl.
The eleven-minute stat is a little unfair
One honest caveat. That eleven-minute figure makes the game sound like mostly standing around, and plenty of people wave it about for exactly that reason.
What it misses is what the pause is for. The forty seconds before each snap is where the game is decided: the quarterback reading the defence (US spelling: defense), the coaches sending in a play, both sides shifting to counter each other. Four seconds of action, bought with forty seconds of chess. That ratio is the sport itself.
If the mechanics of the game is what you are after, how the NFL works is the place to start. If it is the commentary losing you, your first NFL game, decoded is the phrasebook.