ROSWELL, Georgia – Just as I spent Christmas hopping from one football game to another, I rang in 2006 in similar fashion. I attended the Georgia Dome trifecta and survived to tell the tale of going to three football games – the Peach Bowl, Falcons-Panthers, and the Sugar Bowl – in about 72 hours.

For those of us who are football fans, it can be easy to forget just how long a football game can be, but they’re long – very long. In addition to more traditional stoppages of play for incompletions, penalties, injuries, team timeouts, official timeouts and (in college) first downs, the length of a modern football game now includes TV timeouts, replay reviews and challenges, and extra long halftimes. The result has been that games last at least three hours and often longer. Don’t get me wrong, I still love football; and I’ll put up with a long game when I’m watching exciting football like last night’s Sugar Bowl, which didn’t end until about 12:45 a.m. I was, however, a little concerned going into the game because both the Peach Bowl and Falcons-Panthers game were blowouts in which the winning teams outscored their opponents by a combined score of 74-14. Of course, just because it isn’t a close game doesn’t mean it’s that much shorter. In fact, games that are runaways can easily drag on more than those far more competitive.

Regardless of how much football I have seen in person over the last few days or the fact that I’m beginning to feel a sentimental attachment to the seat that I sat in for over 9 of those 72 hours, I love football no matter how long the games last, and for that reason it was time well spent.

Filed under: Opinion/Editorial