Looking forward to watching some college football bowl games this year? Americans for Responsible Advertising (AFRA) offers some things to remember while making your bowl-watching plans.
Remember that you will have your choice of 39 bowl games to choose from. The first one is the R & L Carriers New Orleans Bowl in New Orleans on December 20th. The really big games, however, are the semi-final and final College Football Championship (CFP) games. The two semi-final games are the Rose Bowl and the Sugar Bowl. The Rose Bowl will be played on January 1, 2015 in Pasadena, California and the Sugar Bowl will be played on the same day in the New Orleans Superdome. The Rose Bowl telecast will start at 5:00 pm and the Sugar Bowl telecast will start at 8:30 pm. The Championship game that will be played in Arlington, Texas will take place almost two weeks later on January 12th. That telecast will start at 8:30 pm.
Remember also that no matter what your TV Guide says, none of the three CFP games has even a remote chance of finishing in three hours. Four is much more likely. AFRA analyzed three big-time college football games played in November and early December and found that they averaged three hours and fifty-one minutes from the beginning of the telecasts to the ends of the games. CBS Sports recently reported that televised college games have been getting longer since 2009 and that they now take about three hours and twelve minutes to play. The thirty-nine minute difference between the AFRA and CBS estimates is probably attributable to the fact that the AFRA estimate includes halftime as well as the time between the beginning of the telecast and the beginning of the game whereas the CBS estimate does not.
A couple of other things to remember – according to AFRA, if you watch a bowl game from the beginning of the telecast until the end of the game you are likely to see more than 150 commercials and at least 25% of the telecast will be devoted to advertising.
If you are not up to watching a bowl game that starts at 8:30pm, ends well after midnight and exposes you to more than 150 commercials you should consider recording the game. If you do so, you will then have two other choices to make. You could record the game and watch it at a different time. This would allow you to fast forward through the commercials, shorten the time it takes to watch the game by an hour or so, and watch it at a more convenient time. Alternatively, you could record the first hour of the game, start watching it after an hour and fast-forward through the commercials until your recorded time runs out which is usually about the time the game ends.
This article was republished with permission from the original author and publisher, Americans for Responsible Advertising (AFRA).