If you haven't read this article in today's Wall Street Journal Style section -- don't lie, you know WSJ Style is essential pre-lunchtime work-comp reading every morning -- then you ought to.
The basic thrust: for every NFL game you watch on television, you see, on average, 10 minutes and 43 seconds of actual football being played. 60% of what you watch is football players milling around and waiting: huddles, sidelines, Peyton flapping his arms and yelling nonsense word-number combos ad nauseum.
I love football, I love to watch it on television. Going back to school has meant my schedule over the past two years has limited this, pretty much keeping me to the Kentucky Wildcats and the Redskins. My wife can tell you that if I am at home studying on Saturday or Sunday, I will get nothing done. I have to leave the house. HOWEVER, she can also tell you that I have, rather unscientifically, been claiming this very thing for a couple years now. We frequently DVR football games, because it lets me condense 4 hours of viewing time into about 45 minutes. And to think that is still 4 times too long!
Is there another sport where the clock runs without the ball actually in play? Is there another sport where the point of at least one-fourth of the game is to actually have the ball in play as little as possible? I've never played a down of organized tackle football in my life, so I'm not going to comment too much, but I'd love to hear what a football player had to say. How might they feel about the fact that your sport's games entail less than 11 minutes of real action? I imagine they really don't care at all.
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