009: Football games are too long
A look at the length of college football games.
179,100 seconds. 2,985 minutes. 49 hours and 45 minutes.
The total game time of Carolina’s 14 football games this season. An average game time of three hours and 33 minutes. This is about 50 minutes longer than Avatar: The Way of Water. College football games take too long.
Below is a list of all game times from the 2022 season.
College football is in a constant state of change. There is a lot to debate. Transfer portal tampering, a misplaced signing day, coaches changing jobs and coaching their new team during bowl season, alumni shilling for gambling companies and then joining coaching staffs, coaches complaining about players being paid, and more.
The length of the game feels like something that needs to change soon. For example, NFL games last season were about 20 minutes shorter.
How could the game become shorter?
A few ideas:
Shorten halftime: in the NFL, this is 12 minutes long for regular season games. College football has this slotted for 20 minutes. Would reducing this by at least five minutes hurt the sport? Bands can still perform in 15 minutes, right? 18 minutes?
Make replay more efficient: college football replay is broken. Replay should exist, but not all plays should be reviewed. For example, this play review in the Wake Forest and UNC game took ~two minutes. Did it need to take any less than 15 seconds? Review is painfully inefficient and it adds to long games.
Rule changes: Should the clock keep running after first downs? Should back-to-back timeouts be allowed? Should there be a limit commercial breaks or “tv” timeouts? Fewer rules that benefit offense and high scoring?
The games are too long. And this is coming from someone that watched almost every minute of both college semifinal games. All 455 minutes.
check out the code for this chart.
And Happy New Year! This newsletter remains free. The plan is to publish once a week in 500 words or less with at one data visualization about Carolina sports. It will likely run at least through March or basketball season before sorting out if its useful to anyone. All the code written in R can be found here.
This is a pet peeve, so excuse my attitude. Football games are not too long. The time it takes to play a game is to long. Way to many 4 minute commercials. Have play through commercials where the game doesnt have to stop, or just show a commerical why the game is in progress. Ok I know that is a bad idea but if you want to see the game go to the game. But please dont tell me the game is to long and we need to change rules, stupid idea!