By Patrick Costello
One of the most overused tropes in sports is that baseball is boring because it takes too long. A 2014 report by Major League Baseball concluded that an average nine-inning game lasted about two hours and 54 minutes.
Baseball has tried to speed the game up a bit by implementing shorter warm ups for pitchers and quicker mound visits.
While baseball is still long, it is definitely not the most boring sport on television — football is.
Every year, fans lose their mind over the return of football season so that they can spend their Sundays watching every game, dissecting every play and viewing their Fantasy teams. What fans seem to forget every year is just how boring an NFL football game actually is.
The average NFL game lasts three hours and 12 minutes, which is 18 minutes longer than the average MLB game. So why do fans thinks that baseball is more boring? It mainly comes down to the high-octane and up-tempo play of football. NFL football is incredibly fast-paced and thrilling to watch.
Or is it?
The average NFL game has over 100 commercials during the course of the broadcast, which force the games to take media timeouts. There are also injury timeouts, coaches’ timeouts, reviews of every scoring play, coaches’ challenges, the two minute warning and so on. There is so much time spent not actually playing football that it’s no wonder people like watching games at other people’s houses on Sunday. Football is boring, and you need someone to talk to.
Granted, the last two minutes of NFL games are exciting if it’s close, but everyone knows that those two minutes could easily last 15 minutes in real-time. The only thing slower is the last two minutes of an NBA game, when both teams foul so often that it feels as though they’re playing at half-speed. The NFL isn’t quite that bad, but it’s still incredibly annoying.
All of that down-time is made up for by the awesome action on the field, right? Well actually, the Wall Street Journal did a study in 2010 that concluded that there were only 11 minutes in which the ball was actually in play.
They also concluded that there was more time spent on replays (17 minutes) then on actual game play. In 2013, the Wall Street Journal did the same study for baseball and concluded that the ball spent just under 18 minutes in play.
Football isn’t fun to watch unless you’re eating a plate of wings while sitting on your couch surrounded by your friends. At that point, at least you’re afforded the luxury of changing the channel to find a different game. Imagine paying for a ticket to go to a game. It makes less sense than the movie Sully existing.
Why would you pay for a ticket to go to a game, where everything is already massively overpriced, just to watch 11 minutes of action in between five minutes of commercial breaks? At least in baseball you know exactly when the breaks will be — in between each half-inning. During NFL games it feels like there’s a timeout every two minutes.
So why do we believe that baseball is so much more boring than football? It’s shorter, has more action, is played mostly during a warm season when you can go to a game in shorts and is guaranteed to have one truly exciting play during every game. NFL games are just overly drawn out money grabs that sell its fans on the idea that it’s the most exciting sport.
The point is this: if you’re looking for excitement while watching from home, don’t watch football. Turn on a baseball game and save yourself from being bored by the NFL.
