Data Visualizations About Game Time Lengths from the 2025 NFL Season
Clock-wise up
Hello everyone,
We’re reaching the dog days of the offseason here but it’s July now which means that there’s college football next month. We are moving right ahead with some more data visualizations that I promise I have a cohesive plan for when week 1 starts after Labor Day. Today, we’re going to look at game durations. Were last year’s games abnormally long? Are primetime games longer than non-primetime ones? Based on the data I gathered for last week’s write-up, do referees impact game time at all?
But you know the deal, first let’s shout out some creators doing some really amazing things:
Analytics Content I Enjoyed This Week
- is always putting great posts up on Substack, like this one detailing the Seattle Seahawks blitz rates from last season. Check it out here.
- published a great write-up on the 2025 NBA Draft. Check it out here.
- published a great write-up on the two newest members of the FBS: Missouri State and Delaware. Check it out here.
- published a great write-up on surefire future 2026 first round pick in the NFL Draft, Miami RT Francis Mauigoa. Check it out here.
I loved
‘s write-up on the NFL needing a minor league and investigating if the UFL could fit the bill. Check it out on Wide Left here.
So What Are We Looking Into Today?
I wanted to look into how long NFL games last in today’s day and age. Is the perception of being fed more commercials now than ever actually true? Who is to blame or longer games? Is it a specific team, network or referee? Let’s find out.
First, let’s run a query to get the average regular season game duration per NFL season:
Not much difference among those, that’s it for this week. Talk soon!
I’m joking. One of these days I promise a hypothesis I have will result in something meaningful, but I’m not going to let no significant difference in average game times league-wide stop me from giving you a great data visualization this week. Here’s another quick plot showing the week by week average regular season game duration from 2021-2024:
Week 13 with the large spikes? That’s Thanksgiving week. Other than that, there’s really no variance between how long games last week over week.
Off screen I ran an Analysis of Variance (ANOVA) on these game durations to try and establish relationships between game durations and different variables available to us in the nflfastR dataset like temperature, start time, day of the week, number of penalties, higher scoring games, and our added referee data from last week. What I found is that games with more penalties and higher scoring games tend to take longer to finish than those with fewer penalties and lower scores. That isn’t necessarily a groundbreaking find though. On average, referee Alex Kemp’s games took a full 8 minutes shorter than other NFL referee’s games.
The conclusion here is that we’re just splitting hairs. There may be a 10 minute or so swing from week to week but nothing exactly significant enough to report. Sometimes you swing and miss, sorry folks.
Longest Average Game Times from the 2024 NFL Regular Season
Here’s a visualization I made for this week though, it’s supposed to look like a clock. I’ll create a premium tutorial on how to make this soon.
Dallas led the league with an average game duration of 3 hours and 10 minutes. Both Thanksgiving staples, Dallas and the Detroit Lions, feature on this top 12 list.
That’s about all I have for today. A lot of searching this week, but not a lot of finding. That’s okay, I hope you still enjoy the plot. Talk soon!
Thanks for the shout out!