NFL Games Are Boring And Overrated: Ian Miller

There's no question that the NFL has become the most popular sport in America. And it's not remotely close.

NFL games are frequently among the most watched shows of the year, with Sunday Night Football the highest rated television program in the country during the 2022/2023 season.

Thursday Night Football and Monday Night Football also were in the top six shows, unsurprisingly. And then, of course, there's the Super Bowl. Nothing can come close to the Super Bowl when it comes to ratings, fan interest and status.

But why does the NFL continue to dominate the world of professional sports when the games are so…boring? 

And make no mistake, the games are boring. Despite what the NFL industrial complex and the league's relentless marketing machine would have you believe, professional football is one of the most boring sports on television. Don't believe it? There's plenty of evidence showing why.

Chicago - Soldier Field. Photo: Jamie Sabau-USA TODAY Sports

NFL Games Are Commercial-Filled Slogs, With Hints Of Action In Between

In 2010, the Wall Street Journal studied NFL games to find out what percentage of the average contest is actual ball-in-play action and how much of it is devoted to, well, everything else. And the numbers are staggering.

According to its research, in a generic NFL game, the ball is in play for just 11 minutes. The average television broadcast though, is roughly three hours and 10-15 minutes. So where does the rest of the time go? It's wasted on nonsense and advertising. The breakdown of the ~190 minutes of broadcast time is staggering.

• 75 minutes of screen time is players huddling, standing at the line of scrimmage or milling around between snaps
• 17 minutes of replays
• 12 minutes of showing coaches walking on the sidelines
• 11 minutes of on-field action

The rest of the broadcast showed the broadcast booth, crowd shots, with just a few seconds spent on cheerleaders.

Less than 6 percent of the average NFL broadcast in its analysis was spent on actual football plays. 94.5 percent of the broadcast was wasted time or advertising. And this is the most popular sport? 

FiveThirtyEight confirmed the Journal's research in early 2020, a decade later. It tracked the NFC Championship Game in January 2020, with the results demonstrating just how mind-numbing the experience can be.

In the three hour and 15 minute broadcast of the matchup between the San Francisco 49ers and Green Bay Packers, there were 18 commercial breaks that lasted for 43 minutes. Not including those during halftime. 

The 107 total plays between the two plays amounted to just over 14 minutes of football action. There were more than three times as many minutes spent on commercials. Compare that ratio to the English Premier League; soccer matches are continuous, though admittedly slowly paced. As a result, in the average two-hour broadcast, roughly 59 minutes show players on the pitch and there are just 10 minutes of commercials. 

NFL Gets The Benefit Of The Doubt Other Sports Don't Get

For years, and perhaps even justifiably so, Major League Baseball games were described as "slow" or "boring" by football fans. To hear their complaints, baseball games spent most of their time on players standing around waiting for something to happen. And they were right.

Yet according to FiveThirtyEight, the ratio of action to inaction in the NFL was actually worse than MLB. And that was before the pitch clock sped baseball games up considerably.

Their analysis of NFL broadcasts revealed just 18 minutes of action, with 50 minutes of commercials and 141 minutes of "nonaction," described as stoppages and commentary. There were 191 minutes of combined action, commercials and nonaction in regular season NFL games, and just 9.4 percent of it showed the ball in play. In the slower era of pre-pitch clock MLB postseason games, the ratio was 10.3 percent. 

But for MLB, that was based on a three-hour and 45 minute playoff game. The average professional baseball game time in 2024 is now down to just about two hours and 38 minutes. Assuming the same amount of commercial time, 50 minutes, as the average NFL game, roughly 15 percent of a 2024 MLB television broadcast is spent on action. That's significantly better than the 9.4 percent in the NFL. Simply, there's a lot more going on in your standard baseball game these days.

What about scoring? Well, the average NFL game now has just 43.4 points, up slightly from 43.3 points per game in 2022. That's roughly 21 points per game per team. Assuming, for simplicity's sake, those points come on three touchdowns per team, that's just six scoring plays. In 2023, the average MLB game had roughly nine scoring plays. There's actually more scoring in baseball than in the NFL, though, of course, runs only count for one.

So why is the NFL so much more popular?

NFL Benefits From External Circumstances

Simple; sports betting and fantasy football.

Starting in the mid-late 2000's, the NFL's takeover of the sports world accelerated, with the league cementing its dominance in the 2010's. Some other pursuits started picking up steam around that same time too, accelerating into the 2020's: sports betting and fantasy football. 

It's not just that, of course. The NFL also benefits from a much shorter season than MLB. Instead of 162 regular season games per team, they play just 17. And those games are heavily concentrated on one day, or one nationally televised game on specific nights. Then there's the Red Zone Channel, a brilliant bit of innovation that gave casual fans the ability to track exclusively the most exciting plays on Sunday mornings and afternoons. 

It's a lot easier to follow a sport when it requires your attention only on Sunday or after work on a Monday or Thursday. Especially when you have money on it, or are tracking fantasy players.

MLB though, is a slog. There are 4,860 regular season baseball games. There are 544 regular season NFL games. It's a lot more work to track baseball than football. And because baseball games are much harder to gamble on, given the randomness inherent in the sport, and fantasy is far less popular due to the required time commitment, it hasn't benefited from the same level of off-field popularity.

Football is fun to watch, and for some fans, the strategy discussions, huddles and coaching shots actually serve to increase the tension and excitement. But there's no argument that the NFL actually has more action or is more thrilling to watch. The vast majority of plays are uneventful handoffs, incompletions or short passing gains. Every play could be something better, but the vast majority aren't. 

But the fact that the NFL's popularity has risen so high and far is almost certainly, partially, due to the fact that many fans now have money riding on the games. There's a lot more reason to watch when there's money involved. Even if you have to sit through three minutes of commercials for every minute of action.