Pardon the interruption: the sports speed blur

It almost goes without saying that the last few weekends have been great for sports fans. We’ve had some massive College Football matchups, the MLB playoffs, and the beginning of the NHL and NFL seasons.

In fact, there have been so many exciting games on that I often find myself flipping back and forth between two or three channels to watch several at a time. But this year, I’m beginning to notice that there is a widening discrepancy—due to new rules and new advertising strategies—between the speed of our four core sports in the United States (baseball, basketball, football and hockey). This widening gap can only be described as “the sports speed blur”: The underlying commonality for most sports is that games tend to slow down dramatically as the end approaches.

In football, quarterbacks take their time strolling to the line of scrimmage all game until the end of the game requires them to employ a “hurry-up” offense—why not just “hurry-up” and score points all game? Similarly, baseball games are hampered by endless pitching changes that can prolong the last inning into taking up as much time as the first three.

All sports fans will agree that basketball is simply the worst in this respect. The last 60 seconds of the game can appear to last hours as opposing coaches take timeout after timeout while players foul each other and participate in free-throw shooting contests.

Some of these sports are adding commercial breaks and television timeouts that seem to prolong things even further. Many football fans have recently been lamenting over the fact that a viewer now has to suffer through commercial breaks before and after a kickoff not to mention anytime there’s an injury or dispute on the field. Sometimes there can be four commercial breaks on one given set of downs.

While some sports are getting slower, the NHL has implemented rule changes to speed up the game. This season is actually the first in several years where no new NHL rules are taking effect.

Over the past few years, the NHL has made “icing”—which used to stop play frequently—more of a deterrent for teams and has also put an end to TV timeouts after the play is stopped. The league’s officials are also limiting fighting, dropping the pucks quicker for faceoffs and the NHL has done away with several other rules that caused the game to stop more frequently.

The result is a game that moves exceptionally fast and relies more heavily on the players’ endurance and skills. For fans, it gets even better. I’ve frequently seen games where eight or ten whole minutes go by without a whistle! Even with brief stoppages, it could be seven or eleven minutes into a period before a commercial break is taken and sometimes, there are only three commercial breaks in a period.

Of course the NHL has two large stoppages in between the three periods, but even those breaks have been cut to 13-15 minutes instead of the 20 minutes I endured as a child—and at least those breaks are continuous so that I can make use of the time.

So, hockey’s fast, baseball’s slow, and the last minute of a hoops game is even slower, but how does this lead us to “the sports speed blur”?
Normally, I encounter these sports separately and hence I notice their differences less. But in a year when baseball is dipping into the month of November and hockey is utilizing a compacted schedule to accommodate the Olympics, games are being programmed on top of each other, which makes these differences strikingly clear.

When I flip back from hockey to baseball, it’s as if I’m exiting the highway going 95 mph onto a ramp with a 20 mph speed limit.

Last night, I watched “Monday Night Football” and an NHL game simultaneously. The hockey game (which started 30 minutes before the football game) ended by 10:00-10:15 while the football game was only beginning the second half. After watching two plays of football, I came back to the hockey game only to notice that a goal had been scored and another penalty called all in that short amount of time.

One only needs to examine the respective replay policies between football and hockey to understand this point clearly. In hockey, the official skates over to the side of the rink, talks briefly to an official upstairs who is on the phone with the “war room” in Toronto (which reviews all goals) and then announces the decision to the crowd within a minute. In football, the referee runs (well, jogs, let’s say) to the farthest corner of the field passing through several zip codes on the way and watches endless video replays while the coaches pace up and down the sidelines like Tudor kings. Then—only after minutes of waiting—does the network cut to a commercial before returning minutes later to tell you what the decision was. Fifteen minutes to decide if the runner’s knee was down is even a little excessive for John Madden.

I’m not here to proselytize for the sport of hockey, but I do believe that there is a serious issue at hand here when it comes to catering to the fans. The NFL will always have a strong fan base, but its popularity hurts fans in a way when it comes to commercials. The NHL on the other hand, has struggled to regain some limelight and therefore fans have directly benefitted from rule changes designed to improve their viewing experience.

I do not believe that criticizing the speed of certain sports that are meant to be slower is valid—and indeed there’s nothing like a lazy day at the ballpark—but there are too many examples of unnecessary downtime that is just plain out frustrating.

I would have more to say, but the football game is just coming back from a commercial.

Jacob Shapiro is a List College senior majoring in history and Talmud.
sports@columbiaspectator.com