Some Blog Site

Everyone familiar with timed sports (football, basketball, hockey, etc.) knows that the last minute of the game lasts a lot longer than the first minute of the game.

But how bad is it? And how does it change during the game?

I thought I would put together a chart showing the concept. I don’t have any actual data – I’m just going off my instinct here.

Maybe the chart is skewed toward the worst case, not average. For example, how long – real time – does the last 10 seconds of a close NBA game take? How many plays can occur in the last 15 seconds of an NFL game if a team is trying to rally a win? That is what I was thinking when I chose the Y-axis scale of multiples of game time. If 15 seconds of the game clock takes 2 minutes of my life, that’s a scale of 8x.

One of the more annoying aspects of sports is the delay that is part of the game but shouldn’t be. Example #1: intentional fouling near the end of a basketball game. Example #2: trying to ice the kicker for field goals in a football game. I hope at some point they change the rules to forbid those.

Any recommendations for the Y-axis scale?
Any other proposed changes to the rules to make the ends of games less annoying to the fans?