It’s that time of year when your VCR becomes ever more important if you appreciate saturating your senses with college football/basketball and the NFL. There’s too much to keep up with. Your television set can’t do the job.
This means deploying other methods – specifically, recording those games that appeal to you. You might consider special rivalries or big games that factor into the playoffs, or just plain intriguing matchups like the Army-Navy game. If you follow football and/or basketball, there is huge overlap in the November-January time frame. You can’t watch them all. So, you record them and fast forward through the dead time.
Recently, a problem has occurred though. Due to the increasing length of games, commercials, timeouts, I’ve missed the end of several critical games. Not the end of the world, no question, but still irritating. Another First World problem.
Here’s what happens. You set the recording for the time and station. Simple enough. Every time I do this for college basketball/football and the NFL, I click the settings to add a half hour to the game. I figure all the game-ending timeouts and commercials will always make the game go longer by 30 minutes or less.
This has been true and effective for several years. Barring a quintuple overtime football game, I was always able to watch the entire game by adding those extra minutes.
For some reason though (and I haven’t quite figured this out yet; perhaps you the reader can help me), this fall has seen games going longer than usual (meaning longer than the 30 extra minutes that the game already shouldn’t need). Multiple recorded games that included the extra half hour did NOT end up recording the full game.
This means these contests are now going more than half an hour longer than scheduled. Easily remedied, yes, as you just need to set your device to record an extra HOUR instead of half-an-hour, which is what I’m doing.
The big question though is WHY? What’s going on with the increased length of the contests? Has there been a slow creep in terms of commercial interruptions? Do the games not start on time?
I believe there are three components to this additional time extension: 1) as noted above, it appears as if the start of games takes longer. Since I fast forward through all that crap, it’s hard to tell how many minutes after the “designated start time” that the opening kickoff or tap actually happens. Maybe the networks are loading up longer with the prognosticators to tell us what is going to happen in the game so we know what we’re going to see when we actually start watching.
Or, 2), injuries is a second (and very likely) possibility. I am struck repeatedly how many athletes get hurt in every game, and how long it takes to get them off the field or court when it is serious. Even if minor, the delays happen more than they did five years ago.
Finally, 3) is video review. Another unknown when it comes to how many minutes of video review increases the length of a game, so let’s access Mrs. Google right now and see what she says: there is no exact answer. Best guess is 3-4 minutes per NFL review, which, of course, gives advertisers more minutes to air their inanity.
The games aren’t getting longer. The interruptions are. Maybe that’s why cell phones become more important to distract us during the down time. Give me high school sports. They rule!
This means deploying other methods – specifically, recording those games that appeal to you. You might consider special rivalries or big games that factor into the playoffs, or just plain intriguing matchups like the Army-Navy game. If you follow football and/or basketball, there is huge overlap in the November-January time frame. You can’t watch them all. So, you record them and fast forward through the dead time.
Recently, a problem has occurred though. Due to the increasing length of games, commercials, timeouts, I’ve missed the end of several critical games. Not the end of the world, no question, but still irritating. Another First World problem.
Here’s what happens. You set the recording for the time and station. Simple enough. Every time I do this for college basketball/football and the NFL, I click the settings to add a half hour to the game. I figure all the game-ending timeouts and commercials will always make the game go longer by 30 minutes or less.
This has been true and effective for several years. Barring a quintuple overtime football game, I was always able to watch the entire game by adding those extra minutes.
For some reason though (and I haven’t quite figured this out yet; perhaps you the reader can help me), this fall has seen games going longer than usual (meaning longer than the 30 extra minutes that the game already shouldn’t need). Multiple recorded games that included the extra half hour did NOT end up recording the full game.
This means these contests are now going more than half an hour longer than scheduled. Easily remedied, yes, as you just need to set your device to record an extra HOUR instead of half-an-hour, which is what I’m doing.
The big question though is WHY? What’s going on with the increased length of the contests? Has there been a slow creep in terms of commercial interruptions? Do the games not start on time?
I believe there are three components to this additional time extension: 1) as noted above, it appears as if the start of games takes longer. Since I fast forward through all that crap, it’s hard to tell how many minutes after the “designated start time” that the opening kickoff or tap actually happens. Maybe the networks are loading up longer with the prognosticators to tell us what is going to happen in the game so we know what we’re going to see when we actually start watching.
Or, 2), injuries is a second (and very likely) possibility. I am struck repeatedly how many athletes get hurt in every game, and how long it takes to get them off the field or court when it is serious. Even if minor, the delays happen more than they did five years ago.
Finally, 3) is video review. Another unknown when it comes to how many minutes of video review increases the length of a game, so let’s access Mrs. Google right now and see what she says: there is no exact answer. Best guess is 3-4 minutes per NFL review, which, of course, gives advertisers more minutes to air their inanity.
The games aren’t getting longer. The interruptions are. Maybe that’s why cell phones become more important to distract us during the down time. Give me high school sports. They rule!