Tuesday Play Count Tracking: Plays Down, Time Up, What To Do With Weather?!
A bunch of weather delays that didn't really impact us, but I am on notice.
First and foremost, thanks to Paul R for checking in on last week and hitting the OT situation from TTU-Wyoming. Secondly, I don’t know what the hell to do with weather delays. Miami was in a delay, they aren’t on the list but my life on Saturday was insane with Wake Forest, NC State, Virginia Tech all in a delay.
Thirdly, a day late, but it was the math and the fact I had to go to a kid thing today that really was a time suck in terms of workflow. Adding 7 teams previous season average game times and making sure I get that right, plus the new times got me working a little late tonight.
So, maybe that is just an asterisk or you just have to deal with it. I am adding new columns to the sheet. One for average plays per game, now that we have more than one game, also average minutes per game (which is why the delay is wild because some games get delayed after starting versus games never starting and playing a normal timed game later than expected) and the last one will be average minutes per game from a season ago.
Here’s the chart:
Green is what we know. Last year’s numbers. Red is going to keep going all season long as we learn. I will work on more color coding too.
Observations:
-Plays are down, across the board, except New Mexico and an LSU team that didn’t get blown out by FSU and instead scored 72 against Grambling.
-Average time in minutes is up for everyone who isn’t Michigan or Miami. Michigan obviously is living in a Barbie World right now, so when they get into Big Ten play we will see what happens. Miami, I still have no idea what we expectations should be for them because they make huge mistakes but also have some quality talent.
Basically, this is the part that is the most intriguing for me because plays are down but time is up. Which means this is about controlling broadcasts, as we hit on last week, not just play time. Reviews. Breaks. Injury time lengthened.
I think I’m going to go ahead and keep all the delays in because they keep running commercials and have you by the tail on those. They go to studio and then commercial. They give you, “bonus coverage” of games that are on other channels to make you stick around. So, I am going to keep counting it, same as we count OT. Especially since the entire goal is to keep you on the channel and showing you commercials.
Oh, and if the players have to stay that long, you do too, so it counts.
Should I go ahead and switch the “average times” into hours and minutes?
Let me know in the comments. Games are staying long. Plays are down. I don’t know if this is a win or a sin.
Cheers!!
I would say keep it to minutes. Not that you have to change your ways, but putting them alphabetical makes it tricky to quickly compare them when you picked based on their 2022 PPG. I'm going to play along with my own spreadsheet, ordered least to most ppg. You happened to pick half the teams with distinct color schemes, so making trends based on uniform colors was going good till I hit UNM, TT, WKU.