There are 11 minutes of action in an entire football game

The next time your football fan friends talk about how boring baseball is, shoot them this link:

According to a Wall Street Journal study of four recent broadcasts, and similar estimates by researchers, the average amount of time the ball is in play on the field during an NFL game is about 11 minutes. In other words, if you tally up everything that happens between the time the ball is snapped and the play is whistled dead by the officials, there’s barely enough time to prepare a hard-boiled egg . . . the ratio of inaction to action is approximately 10 to 1.

Seventeen minutes are devoted to replays. Commercials take between an hour and seventy-five minutes, or 60% of the broadcast. Sixty-seven minutes are devoted to players standing around and broadcasters bleating about whatever it is broadcasters bleat about.

I’m curious about what the ratios are for baseball. It obviously depends on what you count as dead time. I would count the time after the batter is actually in the box and the pitcher is getting the signs as “action,” because the ball is technically live and there’s something valuable and observable happening then, but many might not.

In fact, football partisans may point out the difficulty in determining the difference between action and inaction in a baseball game as even more damning than their own game’s pitiful ratio. Tomato-tomahto. Ultimately, arguing football vs. baseball is like religion or politics and facts kinda stop mattering at some point.

But one thing is indisputable: baseball is better than football in every conceivable way. You can look it up.