Basketball is not one of my favorite sports. Generally speaking, the season is too long, teams don’t really play defense, scoring is too easy, and, when games are close at the end, the losing team constantly fouls the winning team to try and preserve clock time — what could be the most exciting part of the game is reduced to abject drudgery.
The NCAA Men’s Division I Basketball Championship, also known as ”March Madness”, can be very exciting due to it’s single-elimination format, however, the way they play the last few minutes of close games mars an otherwise enjoyable experience.
I know it works once in a while, but that doesn’t make it fun to watch.
As the NCAA tournament got closer this year, I began to wonder just how long, on average, the last two minutes of a game actually takes to play, and if the closeness of the score matters. So, during the tournament, I got out my trusty stopwatch (last seen during Super Bowl XLIV) and timed the last two minutes of as many games as I could.
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An astrophysicist and an economist get together and make a new calendar that will have dates fall on the same day year after year. They’re shooting for 2017 for worldwide adoption.
The calendar would accomplish this by means of a 364-day year — augmented every five or six years with an extra week tacked on at the end.
Yeah, that makes it so much cleaner. Good luck with that.
In mid-January, the Wall Street Journal analyzed the actual amount of play time of the average football game. They added up the amount of time the ball was actually alive and in play in four different games, and it averaged out to about 11 minutes. They concluded that the average game broadcast on TV shows 17 minutes of replays and 67 minutes of players standing around. With the biggest game of the year coming up, I decided to do my own analysis of the actual play time. Here are the results:
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It’s taunting, and mocking, and generally just having a good time at my expense. Case in point:
Why don’t they match? Why?!
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