Hydration Breaks
TV executives and the NCAA have shortened the length of the game by running the clock and added two more pointless breaks in the form of the two minute warning. I’ve been to games where my only memory is standing there waiting for the TV timeout to go away for the fourth time in the last six minutes of play. At what point do we start to care?
The SEC and ESPN decided they need to cram six (link available if you don't believe me) lengthy and annoying commercial breaks during the fourth quarter of the SEC championship game. These commercial breaks generally run 3 1/2 to 4 minutes long and this is just one quarter. Somehow, we're willing to sit around for hours, often in blizzard conditions, and watch the TV timeout clock without complaining as a 2 hour event is stretched to 4 hours. But as we are discovering in the World Cup, soccer fans are extremely angry and continuously boo one 2 minute and 15 second “hydration break” per half. To me, we’re all victims of the frog in slowly heating water factor.
Just curious if there's a limit or not? Would we allow for 11 TV timeouts a quarter and five hour game lengths with 79% commercials? I'm curious what our limit is because soccer's limit seems to be zero.