Well since yesterday was the last day of football until next year, I thought I would share the truth behind the great game of football. Studies show that there is actually only 11 minutes on average of actual gameplay in a NFL football game, and of course my girlfriend manages to be walking in front of the television 7 of those 11 minutes. To break it down, we got: 67 minutes of players just hanging out, 17 minutes of replays, 11 minutes of gameplay, and 3 seconds of girls with pom-poms shaking their big boobs.

Above is a sortable chart to see how every minute is accounted for in a sampling of four recent NFL games on different networks. Each frame represents 1% of the broadcast, excluding commercials. I know it is a little hard to see but pretty much that first green strip at the top is actual gameplay, the rest is everything else that makes up the 3 hours of an nfl game.

In fact, the average telecast devotes 56% more time to showing replays. So what do the networks do with the other 174 minutes in a typical broadcast? Not surprisingly, commercials take up about an hour. As many as 75 minutes, or about 60% of the total air time, excluding commercials, is spent on shots of players huddling, standing at the line of scrimmage or just generally milling about between snaps.

Football—at least the American version—is the rare sport where it’s common for the clock to run for long periods of time while nothing is happening. After a routine play is whistled dead, the clock will continue to run, even as the players are peeling themselves off the turf and limping back to their huddles. The team on offense has a maximum of 40 seconds after one play ends to snap the ball again. A regulation NFL game consists of four quarters of 15 minutes each, but because the typical play only lasts about four seconds, the ratio of inaction to action is approximately 10 to 1. (At the end of a game, if one team has a lead and wants to prevent the other team from scoring again, standing around and letting the clock run down becomes a bona fide strategy).

Fine I guess I'll watch more hot cheerleaders during the game.

The most surprising finding of The Journal’s study—that the average game has just 10 minutes and 43 seconds of actual playing time—has been corroborated by other researchers. In November 1912, Indiana University’s C.P. Hutchins, the school’s director of physical training, observed a game, stopwatch in hand, between two independent teams. He counted 13 minutes, 16 seconds of play. During last month’s Wild Card games, Mr. Crippen, the football researcher, dissected the broadcasts and found about 13 minutes, 30 seconds of action. Wow I want my money back for that $200 dollar nosebleed seat please, thanks.