Watching a college football game on television takes forever. Sixty-minute games are never anywhere close to sixty minutes long.
Rarely does a broadcast last less than three hours and 30 minutes. Oftentimes a broadcast will extend greater than four hours.
If a viewer at home is not watching multiple games at one time (shoutout Multiview), it can be excruciating. For those who are in attendance at the game, all of the stops in action get exhausting.
To try and speed things up, the the NCAA implemented new clock rules during the offseason. Where the clock used to stop on first downs, that is no longer the case until there are less than two minutes remaining in either the second or fourth quarters.
Chip Kelly was among the many coaches to criticize the changes. Fans are furious.
The amount of actual game play has been slashed by a pretty significant margin as teams like Army go on hilariously long opening drives. The real issue did not change— commercials.
Advertisements bog down broadcasts and force viewers, both at home and in the stands, to sit through an absurd amount of down time. It is borderline unwatchable at times.
College football needs less commercials!
Saturday’s broadcast of the Red River Rivalry on ESPN really put things in perspective.
Texas and Oklahoma kicked off at 11:00 a.m. CT. A game between Sacred Heart and Long Island (whose quarterback has the weirdest throwing motion in football) kicked off at the exact same time on the east coast.
Both games were played with 15-minute quarters, because that is how football is played.
The cross-state rivalry game at the Cotton Bowl was broadcast on television. The FCS matchup was not broadcast on television.
One had commercials. One did not have commercials.
As Sacred Heart and Long Island went to halftime, Oklahoma and Texas had not even reached the end of the first quarter. Need more be said?
College football needs less commercials.