Video replays, timeouts, endless commercials – the average NFL game is more than three hours long, and fans are becoming fatigued. So it’s time for a rethink

NFL games are taking way too long – so here are eight ways to speed things up

Regular-season NFL games don’t get much more entertaining than the Dallas Cowboys’ 35-30 victory over the Pittsburgh Steelers on Sunday. There were seven lead changes, four in the last eight minutes. The Cowboys scored the winning touchdown with nine seconds remaining.

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But now for the flip side: because there were 13 scoring plays, the game took 3 hours, 18 minutes to complete on the Fox network. More than three hours of that time were consumed by replays, analysis, Erin Andrews’ sideline reports and, yes, roughly 110 commercials.

The Guardian kept a stopwatch on Sunday’s game to deduct that the actual athletic competition – including kickoffs that resulted in touchbacks and plays negated by penalties – consumed almost exactly 15 minutes, or one-quarter of the 60 minutes on the game clock.

The action was terrific, with rookie Dallas quarterback Dak Prescott throwing touchdown passes of 83 and 50 yards. Pittsburgh quarterback Ben Roethlisberger was not to be outdone, faking a clock-stopping spike, then flinging a go-ahead touchdown pass with 42 seconds left.

Still, there were 30 commercial interruptions during the broadcast, with many commercials coming in “pods,” which the league calls those 2min, 20sec clusters of five or six ads that detractors say kill any sort of flow. Fans may feel like they’re enduring a game.

Of the 15 NFL games played over the weekend, only four were completed in three hours or less – and three lasted 3:20 or more. Tennessee wrapped up its 47-25 victory over Green Bay in 3 hours 36 minutes.

NFL games have dragged for a while. According to Pro Football Reference, week 10 of the 2001 NFL season included 15 games, only four of which were completed in less than three hours. Four games lasted 3:20 or longer.

But there is more to watch these days. Attention spans are shorter. The NFL has attempted to trim the average time of a game to three hours sharp, but fans don’t have seem to have the time or patience to stick around for even that long.

Other factors have played into the waning interest in NFL on TV, among them concussions, injuries and excessive celebrations. But games also last too long. Ideally, they’d be over in less than two and a half hours, or even better yet, two hours. There are 16 regular-season games, after all.

NFL commissioner Roger Goodell said last week that the average time of games, 3:08 last year, is one reason why the league’s television ratings were lagging by more than 10% this season. “We want to take as much what we call dead time, non-action, out of the game, so that we can make the game more exciting,” Goodell said.

Here, then, are eight ways to tighten the stretches of non-action:

1) Faster and fewer video reviews. Late in the first half on Sunday, an apparent 23-yard Pittsburgh pass play was reversed after a review dragged on for more than three minutes. But Troy Aikman, the ex-quarterback turned Fox commentator, had already said: “That looks pretty easy for me to determine it’s incomplete.” A replay official in the booth or even at NFL headquarters could have easily been used to make that call quicker.

2) Shave time between plays. The NFL mandates a maximum of 40 seconds between the end of a play and the snap of the ball for the next play. Sunday’s Cowboys-Steelers game included 125 official plays from scrimmage and seven punts, so even reducing the between-play limit to 35 seconds might have reduced the time of that game up to 12 minutes.

3) Running the clock earlier after incomplete passes. This would be a radical adjustment, but stopping the clock on incomplete passes until the next snap makes no sense any more, since the NFL has plenty of footballs, and no one has to chase down a loose ball to resume play. So how about running the clock after spotting the ball at the line of scrimmage?

This would alter the strategy of a losing quarterback spiking the ball late in the game to kill the clock, of course, but incomplete passes chew up a surprising amount of real time.

4) No more two-minute warnings. The two-minute warning was said to be devised as a way for the scoreboard operator to sync time with the on-field official who kept time, but the scoreboard has been official for nearly 50 years, and the two-minute warning was kept as a break for commercials. College football somehow survives without them, and its games are even longer.

5) Eliminate the chain gang. NFL officials have said they don’t want to do this because it is such a traditional part of the game, but the technology now exists to use some form of laser beams for quicker and more accurate measurements – and remove the need to stop the clock until the chain gang can hustle up to the new line of scrimmage after a long play.

6) Fewer time outs. How about four per game instead of three per half? How about one replay challenge per coach per game instead of two (or even three if the coach is correct on the first two)? Or how about a penalty instead of the loss of a time out on an incorrect challenge?

7) Shortening the “pods”. Advertisements are the true time-sucking culprit. The first 10 minutes of play Sunday included no commercial interruptions, as did the last two minutes, but a 16-minute real-time slowdown late in the first quarter Sunday included four commercial breaks with nearly 20 individual ads.

Between the time the Steelers took a 12-3 lead with 1:13 left in the first quarter and the end of the quarter Sunday, there were 44 seconds of actual action – spread over 16 minutes of real time. Two of the six plays from scrimmage in that span were wiped out by penalties.

Trimming those “pods,” of course, would be a good start, especially considering the commercials tend to repeat themselves. The league or the networks don’t want to lose commercials because that would also mean a loss of revenue.

8) Adding advertisements in other forms. Think of other professional sports. Maybe the NFL would not want advertisements sewn on uniforms, as in soccer, or ads painted or projected on to the field, as in hockey, but ads could be placed in the corners of TV screens – even sponsors for a quarter or a half.

Soccer and hockey also offer advertising on far-side boards, but benches for both sports are on the same side of the pitch or rink. NFL benches are so much longer that it would be difficult to put both benches on the same side of the field to make room for the boards.

If money can be made, space can be created by chasing a few marching bands, photographers and cheerleaders. Sideline reporters don’t add much: before the second half Sunday, Andrews reported that Pittsburgh coach Mike Tomlin told her that the Steelers had to punt less than the Cowboys to win, and Dallas coach Jason Garrett said his team had to clean up penalties to win. Talk about a waste of time.