Actual playing time in a football game

How much football is actually shown and played during the average football telecast? The answer, based on a frame-by-frame analysis of four games is an average of 10 minutes and 43 seconds. WSJ's David Biderman reports. To Read the Full Story. Subscribe Sign In. Part of the discrepancy has to do with the basic rules of American football.

Unlike hockey or basketball, the 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 final tally told an interesting story. The remaining quarters had followed the first:. So, during the two hours and 56 minutes the game took to complete, throughout the 60 minutes of regulation time, the ball was in only in play for 12 minutes and 8 seconds.

The rest of the time, players were standing around, plays were being reviewed and I was being bombarded by a multitude of beer commercials and truck advertisements.

I recognize the strategy element of football and the importance of time between plays to try and develop plans that deceive the opposing team, but to think all of the important bits of a three hour game could be viewed in little more than 10 minutes, it only reinforces what I'll be doing next Sunday. The clock continues to move. The team must put the ball back into play within 35 seconds after the play clock is started. As time rolls after tackles are made, players are running back to the huddle, getting the play call and then setting up for the next play.

The clock stops on an incomplete pass or when a runner goes out of bounds, but as soon as the referee puts the ball back on the line of scrimmage and rules that it has been readied for play, the clock begins to count down again. While the actual playing time has remained relatively the same over the years, the actual time from the start of the game to the finish has increased dramatically.

The use of timeouts by each team, injury time, replay time and commercial time has lengthened games significantly. The average television broadcast will show as many as replays during an individual broadcast.

Football broadcasts can last almost four hours when a game goes into overtime or for special broadcasts, including the Super Bowl.