If college football games feel longer, is it the commercials’ fault? We checked the tape

Editor’s note: This story is running in tandem with an examination of the impact of college football’s new clock rules on game lengths. You can read that story here.

It’s the commercials. They’re the easy punching bag, the easy excuse. So it was last year when The Athletic ran a story about college football games taking longer, industry folks pinning the blame on increased offense but fans responding, No, it’s the commercials.

And so it is this year when new clock rules were instituted to shorten games, including doing away with stoppages after first downs until under two minutes remain in each half. And it wasn’t just UCLA coach Chip Kelly, who told an ESPN reporter at halftime of the Bruins’ season opener, “Hope you guys are selling a lot of commercials.” After Week 2, The Athletic subscriber Stephen O. posed the following question as a Mailbag submission: “Stew, can you finally admit that these clock rules are nothing more than an excuse to shove more commercials down our throats? Every single major game was at least three and a half hours!”

In fact, the NCAA says average FBS game length has decreased from 3:22 to 3:16 through Week 3. But The Athletic loves a good conspiracy theory. So we decided to investigate whether there really are more commercials in 2023 college football broadcasts.

In doing so, we learned far more than we anticipated about how in-game commercial breaks work.

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We started with a source who might know a thing or two about the topic: Jim Minnich, a senior VP at Disney who oversees ad sales for all sports properties on ABC/ESPN’s networks. We asked him point-blank: Have college football’s new clock rules allowed you to insert more commercials?

“The easy answer is no, they have not changed,” he said. “They’re consistent year over year. That’s the simplest and easier answer.”

Mark Womack, associate commissioner of the SEC, whose job includes game operations, was just as emphatic.

“The concept that we’ve shortened the game with the first-down rule in order to sell more advertising is completely false,” Womack said.

Case closed.

Or was it? Isn’t that exactly what someone who is trying to secretly insert more commercials into football games would say?

We decided to investigate further. But to do so, we needed a crash course in college football commercial breaks.

It turns out, the matter of how many ads a network can run during a game is determined well ahead of time, is extremely precise, is consistent throughout the season and is dictated by the conference administering the game.

The Athletic obtained documents outlining commercial formats for all SEC and Big 12 games and certain Big Ten games. They vary slightly from conference to conference, and even between each conference’s network partner, but they look fairly similar. They’re either “3-4-3-4” — three breaks in the first and third quarters, four in the second and fourth quarters — or “4-4-4-4,” plus breaks at the end of the first and third quarters.

Here, for example, is the SEC’s format for all games on ESPN and ESPN2:

*Halftime
**In the event of overtime, there’s a 3:00 timeout immediately following the fourth quarter, then no media timeouts during the extra period. A timeout of 1:20 is taken between any additional overtimes.

Essentially, the SEC gives the above break times to the network, and the network’s game producer can implement them as opportunities arise. But they have to operate within those mandated times, under a system implemented a few years ago to make the process more efficient: A red-hatted official, the on-field liaison between television and the referee, now comes on the field with a timeout clock, and the TV broadcast must adhere to the count.

“In the old days before we added the clock, the red hat and the producer would communicate with each other, and he may say, ‘Hey I may need another 15 seconds,’ or, ‘Can you help me? I need another 10 or 15 (seconds).’ Now we take that out of it,” Womack said. “There’s a clock, everybody sees it, TV knows how much time they have to get back (from commercials). And everybody operates on the same understanding of how much time is remaining before the break is over.”

We matched the SEC’s stated format with ESPN’s Sept. 9 Texas-Alabama broadcast, and sure enough, there were 16 breaks (not including halftime). The actual amount of commercial time in each break was around 20 seconds shorter than listed. That’s because networks usually run quick “bumpers” (graphics, theme music, etc.) going into and coming out of the break.

The Alabama-Texas game officially lasted three hours and 24 minutes, of which approximately 45 minutes (not including halftime) were commercials. We compared that broadcast with three 2022 SEC games on ESPN. They followed the same format and averaged between 45 and 46 minutes. No noticeable change from last year.

The Athletic also compared the Week 2 Wisconsin-Washington State game (which falls under the Pac-12’s contract) on ABC with the network’s Week 2 USC-Stanford broadcast a year earlier. Sure enough: same 3-4-3-4 format, with the same exact total of 43:30 in commercials. For the Big 12, we matched the 2022 TCU-Baylor game on Fox with the 2023 Oregon-Texas Tech game on Fox. Both followed 4-4-4-4 formats with approximately 39 minutes of commercial time. And for the Big Ten, we compared Fox’s 2022 Nebraska-Northwestern matchup in Week 0 with its Week 3 broadcast of Western Kentucky–Ohio State this season. Same 4-4-4-4 format, same total of 46 minutes.

The latter came as a mild surprise, given the Big Ten began new contracts this season with Fox, CBS, NBC that are costing those network partners more than $1 billion a year — up nearly 250 percent from just six years earlier. But networks can make back their investments through higher ad rates, in-game sponsorships (think: the Aflac trivia question, the Allstate Playoff Predictor, etc.) and social media partnerships.

“The networks and the conferences understand that you don’t want to make the games unwatchable,” said Big Ten COO Kerry Kenny. He said the league’s new deals with NBC and CBS have similar formats to those of their previous ABC/ESPN deals.

However, there is one wrinkle that could make a game feel longer to the viewer, even though, technically, it is not. Some but not all conferences allow networks to run extra “30-second floaters” during a natural break in the action (an injury, a 30-second timeout, etc.), but the red hat cannot request the referee to stop the game for it. The producer takes the risk that the broadcast won’t miss a snap.

Fox, for example, used three of these floaters in its season-opening Colorado-TCU game. The Big 12, which has shorter breaks throughout the game, allows it. The Big Ten, which has longer breaks between quarters, does not.

Inside the stadium, no one would notice the difference. On TV, though, it’s another commercial break.

No broadcast takes more commercial breaks than the SEC on CBS. In addition to four breaks of 2:20 each quarter (shorter than the ESPN-SEC games), CBS can insert two additional 1:20 breaks per half. And they sometimes cram in 30-second floaters on top of those.

*In the event of overtime, there will be 2:00 of stoppage immediately after the fourth quarter and a one-minute break between additional overtimes.

We logged the 2022 Florida-Georgia broadcast and last Saturday’s South Carolina-Georgia broadcast. The total commercial time for each was approximately 49 minutes, a few minutes more than other networks.

During South Carolina-Georgia last Saturday, CBS only got in three of its four allotted breaks in the first quarter, thanks to long drives by each team. It made up for it by carrying one over to the second quarter, which the SEC permits. It also used the two additional breaks per half in the second quarter, and it snuck in a 30-second break when Georgia called a timeout in the final minute.

So, eight commercial breaks in one quarter — several of them short breaks, but all stoppages of play that not just the fans notice.

“Our coaches have expressed that the game has lost its flow,” said Todd Berry, executive director of the American Football Coaches Association. “Quite honestly, I think it’s something college football needs to look at.”

But the process of commercial breaks is not as haphazard as it may seem. In fact, it’s gotten better the last few years because of the timeout clock and the commercial break format. That was backed up when we charted an SEC game from 2017, South Carolina at Tennessee, which followed the previous commercial break format. There were slightly more breaks — five in the first, third and fourth quarters — and the total estimated commercial break time was 48:20, a couple of minutes longer than the ESPN games we logged for 2022 and 2023. So it has arguably gotten better.

And the TV networks aren’t in total control: The referee on the field can wave off a timeout request.

“If there’s an interception deep into the other team’s territory, they intercept it and return it to the other team’s 15, he can say, well, that’s a change of possession, I’m not going to grant you a timeout because we’ve got momentum involved and we don’t want to stop that for a TV timeout,” Womack said. “So that’s up to the referee to make that decision.”

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Womack granted that there are times where commercial breaks have to get bunched together because the previous quarter didn’t have the allotted breaks, as was the case with the commercial-infested second quarter of South Carolina-Georgia.

But it has never happened, to Womack’s memory, that a network didn’t get all its guaranteed breaks in.

“You find a way,” Womack said. “At the end of the game, teams call timeouts. You have a lot of 30-second timeouts.”

So it’s always been this way. But the new clock rules, aimed at shortening the overall game times, have put the commercial breaks in more focus. Plays in the game have been cut down, but commercial breaks have not gone up — though it may seem that way.

“Here’s what I would say to those who say, ‘All you’ve done is put more commercials in the game,’” said Steve Shaw, the NCAA’s national coordinator of officials. “We see that six plays are out, and six minutes are coming off. To me, that’s an indicator that nobody is throwing in extra commercials, and we’re not adding extra time.”

We checked the tape. He’s correct.

— The Athletic‘s Scott Dochterman, Chris Vannini and Nicole Auerbach contributed reporting.

(Top illustration photos: Brett Carlsen, Ronald Martinez / Getty Images)