Super Bowl time is once again upon us, with all its attendant Roman-numeral hype — this year's National Football League extravaganza is number XLII, 42 for non-Latin savants — and its accompanying deluge of incredible statistics. Over the course of the week we'll hear about the number of people who will watch the game on television (130 million to 140 million in the U.S. alone), the amount of money the game will generate for the economy of Phoenix, Ariz., where it's being played (US$80 million to US$300 million, depending on which economics professor you believe), and the cost of a 30-second Super Bowl commercial (US$2.7 million). One statistic that won't be hyped, though, is the number of minutes of actual on-field action Super Bowl XLII will provide for the football fan. This may be because no one, football fan or not, would believe it. Assuming the Super Bowl unfolds like the average NFL game, the ball will be in actual play on Sunday, Feb. 3 for approximately — wait for it — 12 minutes.

But hold on, you may object, a football game is 60 minutes long, no? Well, no. The clock that counts out those 60 football minutes is not "stop-time" and is often oblivious to the onset and stoppage of action on the field. The average NFL game contains about 120 actual plays, which take an average of six seconds each. That's 720 seconds of play, or 12 minutes. Meanwhile, the average NFL game in total takes three hours to play (the Super Bowl can last an hour longer). This means that a regular-season game contains 12 minutes of action, and 168 minutes of inaction, largely comprised of what Mickey Charles, CEO of www.sportsnetwork.com, describes as "commercials, time outs, the walking around, replays, getting up off the turf, dances in the end zone and injury delays." This yields a percentage comparison of seven per cent action to 93 per cent inaction; if we were to plug these figures into what you might call the Great Sports Action-to-Inaction Index, you'd get a ratio of one to 14. For every one minute of action an NFL game provides for a fan, it inflicts 14 minutes of inaction on him or her as well.

It's easy — even enjoyable — to harpoon the NFL on this point, but in fairness the gridiron behemoth isn't the worst offender when it comes to the A-to-I Index. Major League Baseball is — by a hair. In 1956, a sports reporter for the Kansas City Star timed the ball-in-play duration of a game between the Kansas City Athletics (that city's baseball team at the time) and the Washington Senators, which Washington won 15-6 — a game you'd expect to last a while. Wade allowed a second for each pitch that wasn't swung at or was fouled off, a generous allocation considering that a 90-mph fastball takes just .467 seconds to reach the plate. His stopwatch count? Nine minutes and 55 seconds of actual action. The entire average MLB game today, from first pitch to last out, takes about two hours and 50 minutes; using Wade's count we get a percentage split of six per cent to 94 per cent and an A-to-I Index of one to 16. (A half-century after Sports Illustrated columnist Rick Reilly timed an MLB playoff game at 12 minutes and 22 seconds of action, which yields an A-to-I Index closer to the NFL's.) The eye-opening revelation for a fan? A football game has as little action in it as a baseball game.

If the Big Two of sports south of the border score so low on the Index, how do our Big Two north of the 49th — NHL hockey and CFL football — fare? It's intuitive to think that Canadian football would be at least as inactive as American, but it isn't. With its 20-second play clock and some stop-time included, the average CFL game contains 160 plays (a third more than in the NFL) for a superior A-to-I Index of one to 10. Hockey, like basketball, a pure stop-time game, is a huge A-to-I bargain — 60 minutes of actual action in a two hour and 25 minute average total game time: an index of one to 1.4. (And that's including Don Cherry.)

But even hockey pales to the runaway A-to-I winner, soccer, which to the undoubted dismay of a lot of North American fans is the only major sport where the action provided (90 minutes) exceeds the inaction inflicted (25 minutes), for an index of one to 0.3.

Not only are so many pro sports startlingly lousy in delivering real-time entertainment, we have some startling misconceptions about the athletes who play them. First, that their professions are gruelling. Mickey Charles points out that when TV football commentators make the compassionate exclamation, "The defence has been on the field for 20 minutes!", the actual playing time the beleaguered defense has just endured is four minutes. ("Wow," says Charles. "Be still my beating and humanitarian heart!") Then there's the hourly wage issue. In 2005, Roger Clemens made US$18 million with the Houston Astros, appearing in 32 games, meaning he very conservatively spent about five hours on the mound, putting his income at US$3.6 million per hour. And Clemens was a bargain compared to, say, quarterback Peyton Manning of the Indianapolis Colts. As an offensive player, Manning, whose salary this past year was US$11 million, played at most eight minutes of the 12-minute total of each of the Colts' 18 games, or about two hours and 24 minutes in all — which means he made some US$4,583,000 per hour. Even accounting for water-cooler time and Internet loafing, your average office stiff is more labour-intensive than that.

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