I was given a stop watch as a gift about 40 years ago. The nly time I can remember using it was to track the amount of time the ball was in play during a televised football game. It was the NY Giants against somebody. This was probably sometime in the mid to late 60s.
I wish I still had the notepad because I was pretty meticulous about it. I noted all the plays. Yeesh. My attention span today wouldn’t let me get past the first quarter.
The Giants in those days had a pretty decent running game so dropped passes didn’t stop the clock much when they had the ball.
Anyway, the ball was in play for less than 15 minutes that day. Figure that for each team the offense was on the field for seven and a half minutes and the defense for the rest.
You can see that it takes a lot of television engineering to make 15 minutes of action spread over a 3.5 hour timespan to seem exciting. Yet, millions of viewers are glued to the set drinking it in week after week and missing it when the season’s over. I marvel at the mass hypnosis that TV and good marketing has accomplished.
If you watch televised football for its TV production instead of for its sport value, you can a lot about sedating a population into submission.
I wasn’t really trying to knock football or baseball. It was just a way to illustrate that you can make any sport seem boring, depending on how you describe the way it’s played.
Meanwhile, if you broadcast 90+ minutes of soccer in a continuous fashion, it's "boring" (despite the 15 or so minutes of "excitement").
The 15 minutes thing on football is misunderstanding the game. Snap to whistle isn’t the whole game, the play really starts when both teams finish their substitutions, that’s when they ( and the commentators, and audience) start trying to figure out what the other team is doing, that’s when audibles start, adjustments happen. Yeah the PLAY is 4 to 8 seconds, but the ACTION is closer to 30.
Also football is structured exactly the same as classic TV dramas. For decades TV drama followed the rule of 3: tell the audience what you’re going to show them, show them, tell them what the just saw. That’s exactly how things work for football, the players come out, the commentators start guessing what will happen, the play happens, the commentators analyze and replay. Lather, rinse, repeat. It’s no coincidence that the NFL’s rise coincides with the rise of TV, it truly is the perfect TV sport. It is The Rockford Files with pads.