How long is an NFL game, really? About 11 minutes

An NFL broadcast is scheduled for about three hours. The clock in the corner says sixty minutes. The amount of time the ball is actually in play is about eleven.

That number comes from a Wall Street Journal study published in January 2010, which timed four complete NFL broadcasts and sorted every second of airtime into categories. Eleven minutes of live football was the result.

Where the other three hours go

The breakdown is not what most fans expect. Commercials take roughly an hour — a big number, but not the biggest one.

• 01About 11 minutes: the ball actually in play
• 02About 60 minutes: commercials
• 03As much as 75 minutes: players huddling, standing at the line of scrimmage, or milling around between snaps

That last figure is the one that does the damage. At roughly 75 minutes, shots of players doing nothing in particular accounted for about 60% of the total air time once commercials were excluded. The single largest thing an NFL broadcast shows you is men standing still.

The average telecast gives replays more time than live action.

The study also found the average telecast devoted more time to replays than to live action. Which means that on a typical Sunday, you watch more football that has already happened than football that is happening.

Why the number is not actually an insult

Eleven minutes sounds like an indictment, and it gets quoted that way. But it is really a description of what the sport is. A play lasts about five or six seconds. There are roughly 130 of them in a game. Multiply it out and eleven minutes is exactly what you should expect.

The forty seconds between snaps is not dead air to the people playing. It is substitution, personnel matching, formation reads, and audibles — the part of football that a coach would tell you decides the game. Football is a strategy game that occasionally erupts into an athletic one. The broadcast clock just makes that ratio visible.

It also explains why the league keeps chasing seconds. Every rule change aimed at pace — the play clock after a score, the runoff rules, and now camera-based first-down measurement replacing the chain crew — is an attempt to shrink the seventy-five minutes without touching the eleven.