Every football fan knows the official length of an NFL game. By the book, matches run 60 minutes, broken up into four quarters that go for 15 minutes each. But that tells only a fraction of the story.
American football is a stop and start affair, with the clock freezing after incomplete passes or runners going out of bounds. There's certainly ample opportunity for NFL betting during a game.
There are 12 two-minute timeouts per game (broken up into six per team, with each team getting three timeouts per half – and they don’t carry over from one half to the next).
Halftime breaks eat up 13 minutes and play stops for two minutes after the first and third quarters.
Injuries, which are all too common, also stop the clock. All of this is good for the game and good for the TV broadcasters because breaks in action make for the moments when commercials roll.
And they are anything but trivial. On average, according to Standard Media Mix, 30 seconds of commercial time during an NFL game runs $419,045. Ads top out at $7 million for 30 seconds during the Super Bowl.
Take everything into account, and, on average, that 60-minute football game winds up lasting some three and a half hours.
But averages are not everything. Sharp fans and the folks who smartly bet on sports games realize that wherever averages loom, there are best and worst numbers, major deviations on either end of the spectrum.
With that in mind, while we’re checking our stopwatches, it’s worth looking at some of the longest and shortest NFL games in history.
Outright Winner - Dallas Cowboys
In terms of sheer time spent on the field and off, from the opening kickoff until a winner was declared, the champ there is a showdown between the Tennessee Titans and Miami Dolphins in 2018.
That game lasted seven hours and 10 minutes. But a lot of that time was not directly associated with the playing of football. A pair of lighting delays stretched out the game. One lasted an hour and 57 minutes; the other went for two hours and two minutes.
While the lighting situation got straightened out, players, stuck in their locker rooms, did what we all do when we’re bored: they ate like crazy until all the food was gone. For anyone who was still awake to care, Miami won by a score of 27-20.
The second longest game, with the Baltimore Ravens pitted against the Chicago Bears, ran five hours and 16 minutes in 2013.
There were a pair of delays due to electrical storms that soaked Soldier Field. But there was also an overtime. It ended when the home-team Bears managed to snag a game winning field goal and chalk up a victory at 23-20.
When it comes to actual real time, the longest NFL game on record had the Miami Dolphins squaring off against the Kansas City Chiefs in a 1971 AFC Divisional playoff game.
Tied 24-24 after a first overtime, it went into a second OT, which ended after Garo Yepremian kicked a 37-yard field goal to end the game, with the Dolphins finishing on top by three points. Total playing time: 82 minutes and 40 seconds.
As for the quickest game in NFL history, that record is held by the San Diego Chargers and Indianapolis Colts.
Those teams wrapped things up in just two hours and 29 minutes over the course of a surprisingly high scoring game, laden with interceptions, and aced by the Chargers with a score of 26-19.
For the gamblers among us, though, the length of the game is way less important than the winnings we can reap from juggling point spreads and calculating outcomes – unless, of course, there’s an over/under on the clock.
*Credit for all of the photos in this article belongs to Alamy*
