Here are some ideas on how to shorten really long college football games

ESPN’s Brett McMurphy has written an idea-provoking new article, in which a bunch of coaches and powerful figures in college football consider how to make games shorter. The average game time was 3:17 in 2013, ESPN says, and over the last four seasons, it has reached a point where this year’s average was seven minutes longer, 3:24.

Not everyone sees this as a problem. Games taking a couple more minutes to complete is not an existential threat to the sport. But it is a bit annoying for spectators because long games can cause broadcasts to overlap and require a longer attention span. They cut into time fans might spend doing other things.

The Wall Street Journal noted in September, “You can fly across the country in the time it takes to play a regulation college-football game these days.”

A stumbling block, via Sun Belt commissioner Karl Benson, in McMurphy’s piece:

There is a consensus, if not unanimity, the games need to be shortened, but there is also a strong belief that we don’t want to reduce the number of plays in a game. So until the majority agrees that shorter games will require fewer plays, we will be at a standstill.

Hard to argue. Plays often stop the clock, either until the next snap or until the ball is made ready for play. As the college game has shifted toward the pass over the years, that’s meant more clock-stopping incompletions, more clock-pausing first downs, and the like. Plays interrupt the clock’s quest to get to 0:00.

All via McMurphy’s reporting, linked again here.

Some frequently cited suggestions:

A running clock on first downs (until the final two or five minutes of each half), shortening halftime, limiting the number of replays, reducing the number of timeouts, a shorter play clock, changing in-game substitution rules and limiting the number of commercial breaks.

The current play clock is 40 seconds. (It is 25 seconds after timeouts, injuries, scoring plays, measurements, and a few other qualifying events.) There’s no limit on how many video reviews officials can choose to conduct. There are a lot of commercials.

An anonymous Power 5 coach wants an NBA-length game:

”Shorten the quarters from 15 minutes to 12 minutes.”

MAC commissioner Jon Steinbrecher, a member of the NCAA’s governing Football Oversight Committee, doesn’t seem to want band performances axed:

“You don’t want to lose the substance of what makes college football special,” Steinbrecher said. “I don’t know if you can call halftime sacred, but I don’t know if we want to change what is part of the pageantry of college football.”

Same with Miami AD Blake James:

“You don’t want to cut halftimes because of the difference between our games and the NFL,” he said, citing the marching bands in college as one difference. “It’s hard to envision [reducing] commercial times, so we have to figure out ways to make games a little shorter.”

Washington State coach Mike Leach, always one to speak his mind:

“If they mess with that, they are idiots,” said Leach, whose Cougars were tied for the fourth-longest game average among Pac-12 teams at 3:30. “They should have fewer commercial breaks. If they don’t want to cut the number of commercials, then fit them into less [game] breaks.”

Arizona coach Rich Rodriguez “suggested shortening the amount of time allowed to review instant replay,” McMurphy wrote. That would mean setting a limit in the first place, which the NCAA doesn’t currently do. Replay officials can call for as many reviews as they want, and those reviews can last as long as they want, though individual conferences have different review protocols.

None of the potential solutions here are all that complicated, even if the reasons for longer game times are. But getting athletic administrators around the country to settle on even one or two reforms seems like a brutally difficult job.