The Detroit Lions had just blocked a punt and appeared to be in business against the New York Giants on Sunday afternoon in a game with big playoff repercussions. But first the NFL and the Fox network had to take care of their business, and, as everyone well knows, the league and the networks come before the teams and the fans.
Brandon Copeland had given the Lions good field position by getting in the way of a Brad Wing punt. But the play happened with one minute and 53 seconds left in the second quarter, and – as has been the rule for at least 74 years – the game was stopped for the two-minute warning.
So, rather than the Lions – trailing at the time, 10-3 – immediately taking the field and trying to capitalize on the big play, they stood around, while play was stopped in its tracks for 2min 15sec while no fewer than four commercials aired on Fox.
After picking up a first down on their second play, the Lions stalled and had to punt. The Giants played tough defense in their 17-6 victory, so they deserve credit. But you wonder if that possession might have ended differently if Detroit could have taken quicker advantage.
The NFL has been searching for ways to speed up games to hang on to diminishing television audiences, and it would seem as if the two-minute warning could be, or should be, a casualty. No way, the NFL says.
Ideas to improve the pace of play are always studied by the league, an NFL spokesman told the Guardian, including “in-game elements” like the two-minute warning. But there has not been a formal proposal to eliminate the two-minute warning from the rules, even though it is obsolete and completely unnecessary – unless you want to sell cars, jewelry or smartphones.
The Giants-Lions game was completed in a spiffy 2hr 51min on Sunday, so it was not as if the game dragged. Of course, because of a running clock, there were no more than 15 minutes of real “action” in any game.
Colleges and high schools survive without the two-minute warning – so why not the NFL? When you consider the rule’s origin, it is a wonder how the warning made it into the 1970s.
According to Jon Kendle at the Pro Football Hall of Fame in Canton, Ohio, the two-minute warning has been in the NFL Rule Book since 1949, although a rule was added in 1942 that the umpire must notify the referee when two minutes remain in each half. Pro football games were originally two 45-minute halves and a 15-minute half-time. Scoreboards at the turn of the 20th century rarely, if ever, included game clocks. Time was kept on the field, and rules stipulated that the referee would notify the captains of both teams when not more than 10 minutes and not less than five minutes remained in each half.
“Due to increased [faked] injuries to stop the clock within two minutes of each half, the league made a rule change in 1939,” Kendle told the Guardian. “During the last two minutes of the second half, additional time outs by a team after their third legal time out are not allowed unless it is for a designated injured player who is to be removed. A fourth time out under these conditions is not penalized, but thereafter they are treated as excess time outs and will be penalized.”
Game clocks began to be added to scoreboards in the 1930s, but the “official” time continued to be kept on the field. Games were shortened to 60 minutes in 1906, but, not surprisingly, there continued to be timing discrepancies, especially during closely contested games.
“Timekeeping could be very happenstance in the 20s,” Dan Daly, a veteran Washington sports writer who runs a football history website, Profootballdaly.com, told the Guardian. “Sometimes, if the score was particularly one-sided, the umpire would just let the clock run to get the game over with.
“You’ll even find box scores saying quarters were only 12 or 10 minutes long. This was usually by prior agreement. Teams might have wanted to play a shorter game because they had a train to catch or had played multiple times in the same week or had a bunch of injuries. Or maybe the weather or the crowd size was just lousy. At any rate, the 60-minute game was hardly set in stone.”
Daly says there were a lot of controversies in the old days after games that perhaps ended too abruptly for the team that was trailing: “Teams would be down on the goalline, thinking they had enough time to run a play, and the umpire would be firing his pistol and saying, ‘Game over.’ The warning was one way to keep the teams informed that the end was near. The captains could also ask how much time remained, but there were limits placed on that. Three times, maybe, a half?”
The two-minute warning took care of all that. The NFL was not the cash cow it is today, so the two-minute warning also represented a chance for the league at the advent of television to work another “pod” of commercials into the telecast.
For about 50 years, the time shown on the scoreboard clock has been considered to be “official,” though the side judge, continues to “back up the official clock operator,” the NFL says, by keeping time on his own. Occasionally, the clock operator is still instructed to make an adjustment by the on-field crew after a chaotic play.
Technology has certainly come a long way, but the two-minute warning sticks around like a musty old leather helmet in an equipment bag, out-of-date and unwanted.
The second two-minute warning at Sunday’s Giants-Lions game followed a Dominque Rodgers-Cromartie interception in the end zone from Detroit quarterback Matt Stafford – effectively killing any chance the Lions had at a game-winning rally.
“And the Giants are going to go to 10-4!” Joe Buck said on Fox.
But play was paused so another “pod” with six more commercials could run, for everything from insurance to chewing gum. So, in essence, the point of this two-minute warning was to let the rain-soaked fans at MetLife Stadium know their cheers were no longer needed and they could head home, if they did not know that already.
