Doug’s Dime: Are Football Games Getting Longer?

MN DNR ATV The average NFL game duration has hit 3 hours, 11 minutes this season, up seven minutes over the recent average. That is a shift in the wrong direction compared to other sports that have attempted to rein in their runtime and cut out the tedious elements that spark delays; Major League Baseball games, by comparison, are down from 3 hours, 11 minutes as recently as 2021 to 2 hours, 45 minutes as of this past season. One reason for the football delay is that penalties are spiking this year, hitting an average of 15 penalties per game, the highest since 2005 and up from 11.4 penalties per game as recently as 2023. Andrew Beaton, The Wall Street Journal