You get the idea: An average NFL game will contain somewhere in the neighborhood of 10 minutes of actual play and around three hours of commercials, replays, replay reviews, timeouts, halftimes, huddles and breaks for injuries. And the league wonders why its television ratings are dropping like a stone. It’s not just because of the presidential election, which is now over.

In any case, the league certainly is aware of the issue, and on Wednesday one of its top executives suggested that exceedingly long games may be part of the problem.

“Could they be shorter? Could they be better? Are replays too long?” Brian Rolapp, NFL Media executive vice president and NFL Network president and chief executive, told an audience at a National Association of Broadcasters convention in New York. “We are constantly look at those things to make the pace of the games more interesting.”

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Rolapp seemed to suggest that televisions viewers also are turned off by all the commercial breaks, that those touchdown-commercial-kickoff-commercial sequences that bog down so many games might not be the best way to keep viewers watching.

“In a world where Netflix has no commercials and consumers are used to 15 seconds of pre-roll, is there a better way to do commercials with our broadcast partners?” he said.

And while league officials “are not overly surprised” by the ratings drop this year and “are not overly worried about it,” Rolapp said the league is considering everything in terms of possible changes.