The Super Bowl is the biggest game in American football, so why does it actually have so little of the game being played? Some have joked that more people watch the Super Bowl for the commercials than for the Big Game. Yet many a truth is said in jest, as Shakespeare once said, and while it may not be true that the Super Bowl attracts more cinephiles looking for movie trailers than American football fans, it is true that more of the event is devoted to commercials than actual gameplay.
The Super Bowl is easily the single biggest sporting event of the year in the United States. Beyond the game marking the end of the American football season with one final match between the two highest-performing teams of the year, the Super Bowl is also a major advertising venue. Large companies pay millions of dollars for 30 seconds of airtime during the Big Game and the commercials presented have become highly anticipated standards.
It can't be denied that most of the Super Bowl event is devoted to commercials, but that's true of American football games in general. A 2013 article on Quartz (which quoted earlier research by The Los Angeles Times and The Wall Street Journal) clocked the length of the average American football game in at roughly 192 minutes, or 3 hours and 12 minutes. Of that, the ball was only in play for 11-12 minutes, and roughly 100 minutes was devoted to commercial advertisements. The rest of the time was split between instant replays and the players huddling and assembling on the line of scrimmage. These numbers match up with an analysis of the 2015 Super Bowl by Market Watch, which noted that year's Big Game had 12 minutes and 6 seconds of game play relative to 1 hour of commercials in a four-hour event block.
This lack of action is due to a unique feature of American football that sets it apart from other popular sports. While an American football game is meant to last one hour and is broken up into four quarters of 15 minutes each, the time clock can keep running even when the ball is not in play. This is a drastic difference from hockey and basketball, which only run the time clock when the ball or puck is in motion. This means that, even outside of time-outs and the referees stopping the time clock to give rulings, a good portion of the average football game is devoted to the players lining up as they prepare their next moves.
The sad truth is that American football is a surprisingly low-action activity when one breaks down the numbers. Given that, it's no wonder that more effort is seemingly devoted to promoting the Super Bowl half-time show and its advertising than the game that is meant to be core of the event. It's not a matter of crass commercialism and corporate greed. It's just a sad reality that an hour of football doesn't contain an hour of football, so how can a four-hour event contain a larger than life game?