January 17, 2011
Pittsburg. Green Bay. Chicago. New York. Another weekend coming up for non-sports folks to tolerate the hooting and hollering – and the home-delivery pizza world to put all of their cars on-the-street for emergency calls – until the cast is determined.
For the non-recovering footballholic, the binge will peak on Sunday, February 6th. We don’t call it “Super Bowl” for nothing. The World Cup gets a bigger international audience, but don’t tell that to red blooded Americans. Time stands still on the last NFL day of the (playing) year; this year, Dallas is Mecca – home to the annual culmination of all things pigskin. Every Pop Warner kid, all of the high school wannabes, the college athletes: they all fall asleep with visions of heaven someday… as long as “heaven” involves a game watched by millions, and a ring that will forever designate that they made it to the top of their competitive heap.
Not everyone watches those post-season championship games for the same reason. Last year, a team from the Wall Street Journal watched – no, analyzed – last year’s playoff games as they were broadcast on four major TV networks. Their objective was intriguing: they wanted to know where the time went.
The question: how much playing time – actual ball-in-play time – was found in a championship-level, professional football contest? If you performed an audit, where do the scoreboard seconds really go?
Here are their findings:
Average Broadcast Length: |
185 minutes |
|
|
Average Time in Commercials: |
60 minutes |
Huddles or Stand Around Time: |
75 minutes |
|
Replays for the TV Audience: |
17 minutes |
|
Cut-aways to refs or coaches-in-headsets: |
13 minutes |
|
Actual Playing Time: |
11 minutes |
Since the Wall Street Journal is known for all things financial, those time findings are just raw numbers; at the end of the game, the real question is pretty simple: how much did those guys in helmets get paid for their work?
The average salary in the NFL last season was $990,000 (that does not reflect the average signing bonus of $ 1.3 million, spread across the average career of 3.5 seasons, or the post-season bonuses). Do the math:
24 games (if they go all the way) x 11 minutes per game = 264 minutes of playing time.
$990,000 average annual pay / 264 minutes = $3,750 per minute of playing time.
That’s good work, if you can get it! Listen, those guys work for decades to get a shot at those minutes, and their intense preparation – off season, preseason, and during the season – is not factored into that equation. But when you want to boil it down to the nubs, it is interesting that the time that really matters is when the ball is in play. All of the rest points to those moments when the outcome is determined, and win-or-lose hangs in the balance.
An observation: the “ball in play” moments for followers of Jesus are the moments when our words and deeds can result in eternal game-changes for the people we’ve been called to influence for Eternity. If God was monitoring the game of life (and, He is!): what would He see me doing in my now or never minutes?
Bob Shank
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