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Comment by throwawaysea | Hacker News Reader

It’s also other sports. Basketball has a shot clock for a reason. American football also forces a play to begin within a certain amount of time. In fact I would say that football’s rules are almost a contrived set of constraints that force engagement and exciting action continuously.

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Except when football's rules force delays to allow TV commercials.

Now, if we could just enforce some speed in baseball, and bring the average game length down nearer two and a half hours.

The rules of the game aren't forcing ad breaks; the networks themselves are. Ultimately the broadcast director is in charge of the actual flow of the game, and tells the ref when the ads are finished so they can start the next play.

Well, the two minute warning...

It's interesting to see the power dynamic here. Here in the UK there would be riots if soccer games were broken for ads (I'm really not exaggerating). Over COVID, a short timeout was added in the middle of each half, and this was conditional on there being no ads in the UK.

That said, I watch a fair amount of NFL and with the intensity of play I'm quite grateful for the pauses. American ads are irrelevant to me anyway.

That is fascinating. As someone who doesn't watch sports, I just assumed the match continued during advertisements. Does everyone just stop and stand around during breaks? Is there a director scripting the action, somehow?

I sort of want to attend a match in person to find out, now.

It’s more that the sport is strategically designed for lots of downtime. The match does sometimes continue during ad breaks, but only as long as the ad needs to finish playing. Aside from the “downs” system that stops the clock almost every play, the coaches are awarded gratuitous and lengthy timeouts with which they use strategically to do things such as interrupt successful streaks from the opposing team. And yes, during those plus the 4 quarter breaks there is a lot of just standing around.

The TV production squeezes commercials in during stoppages. But American football has a large number of stoppages (between every play, during timeouts called by the players/coach, after scoring, when a player has an injury, between quarters) so there are lots of chances to squeeze commercials in. They have also added stoppages basically so they can squeeze an additional commercial break, such as the "2 minute warning" at the end of the half, which is just an automatic timeout (and inevitable commercial break). Some say that the addition of video review (where referees review a contested call) was an excuse to add more commercial breaks.

There is no director, but there is a huge production team synchronizing everything and making sure that they squeeze in as many commercials as possible without missing any of the action.

> An average NFL broadcast lasts well over three hours, yet it delivers a total of only 18 minutes of football action.

https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/how-much-football-is-ev...

The game is more stop than start, by a long margin.

Once I got into more free flowing sports, like soccer and rugby, I can't really watch American football anymore.

Same goes for basketball, where the last few minutes of game time are stretched out by timeouts, free throws, and video reviews.

As a British person visiting the US a few years ago, I was invited to watch a televised game of Baseball. The game would stop for what I thought was a random amount of time, asking my host what the hell they were doing - it turns out they were stopping due to the commercials within the TV broadcast. Honestly don't know how you guys put up with that level of advertising...it would drive me mad.

In the UK I've not watched a TV commercial in years (there are none on the BBC, Netflix, Prime or Disney+). All major sports events that are of importance are on the BBC. These are all paid-for subscriptions. I assume to watch Baseball on TV you would have to subscribe to cable? And to have ads on top of your paid subscription just seems greedy.

I've been somewhat taken aback that having paid for a subscription for Eurosport (in the UK) to watch more than the two Olympic streams that the BBC are permitted, I still have to watch adverts.

I don't know, it's a sport that's supposed to test athletes against each other in certain skill sets. Finding ways to win with less exertion and less athletic (i.e., less risky) moves is sort of hacking the game and losing the point. If a guy came at you with a sword in real life (not sure how often this happens but still), you can't necessarily count on being able to get them to agree to rest for a round.

Ya maybe they should change the rule to: whoever loses has to die. To make it more like real life.

I don't know that the lack of this particular feature is contrived to make matches more entertaining for the fans.

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