Hacker News Reader

Comment by freedomben | Hacker News Reader

> Football seems super messed up with a clock that never seems to end

I'm guessing you haven't watched much football then. I'm not saying that as an insult or anything, just a guess. There are plenty of weird things about the game, but the clock isn't one of them IMHO. The clock always runs while the ball is in play. It stops until the start of the next play when a player goes out of bounds or throws an incomplete pass, but continues running after a normal down. Each quarter is 15 minutes of play time, and it's quite strictly applied, and it is always displayed prominently, so it definitely ends. The length of a game is a lot more predictable/understandable than a game like baseball where time is disconnected from game length.

View on HN

It is confusing because if the clock says 30 minutes left the game won't be over in 30 actual minutes.

The actual time left in a game mine as well be RNG for all the meaning the clock has.

Baseball doesn't have a clock and doesn't pretend to. The game is over under very clear circumstances, 3 outs per inning, top and bottom, 9 innings per game.

The weird part about football's clock is how the last two minutes sometimes take at long as the first 13 minutes of the quarter, so if you're only half paying attention to the game while hanging out with people it seems like the clock is going down at a steady pace and then it just stops going down.

This is because the final few minutes of a contended game are the most strategically complex, as the teams are fighting not just for scoring and control of the ball but also for control of the clock. Usually, the team that's behind is trying to slow down the clock (minimizing time-per-play and maximizing actions that require the clock to stop between plays), while the team that's ahead is trying to run out the clock to seal their win (unless their opponent is likely to score, in which case they may want to slow the clock so they have time to respond, etc). And since the stakes are so high, the teams spend a lot more huddle time to deliberate strategy, as well as going for more complicated or unusual plays that often require more careful review from the refs.

It's by far the most interesting part of the game, but if you're only passively watching and waiting for it to be over, it can feel agonizingly slow.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com