Go with media timeouts at the first change of possession at certain points of each quarter. Much like they do in basketball. We all know that the first dead ball after the 16, 12, 8, and 4 minute marks are media time outs. That's four per half. Do the same thing in football. Do two media timeouts per quarter, first change of possession after a designated time.

(01-15-2017 01:24 PM)FlyHawk98 Wrote:  Go with media timeouts at the first change of possession at certain points of each quarter. Much like they do in basketball. We all know that the first dead ball after the 16, 12, 8, and 4 minute marks are media time outs. That's four per half. Do the same thing in football. Do two media timeouts per quarter, first change of possession after a designated time.

This is already being done now. But because each TV provider uses a different TV format and some games are scheduled to have more/longer breaks than other games, it isn't as easy to spot as the 16-12-8-4 breaks in men's basketball.

For example, the FOX/FOX Sports 1/Fox Sports Net TV format has four breaks in each quarter, while ABC/ESPN has three in the 1st/3rd quarters and four in the 2nd/4th quarters. Plus the FOX breaks are typically longer than ABC/ESPN, so the same game on FOX would run close to ten minutes longer than on ABC/ESPN just based on TV commercials.

For the formats used in 2016, refer to pages 9-14 in the linked Pac-12 Television Manual.

The football rules committee needed to standardize the TV format for all televised games years ago. I'm afraid dumb rule changes will be made soon that will end up creating less football (fewer possible plays in a game) in response to this "problem".