The actual action in a football game is around sixteen minutes. The rest is commercials, replay’s, guys just wandering around ...
I hear you. The clock runs for 60 minutes, but, it takes over 3 hours to play the game. There’s lots of dead time, plus time when the clock is stopped.
I think in recent years, they have more commercial time outs than they used to have. Just anecdotal evidence, can’t prove it, but it seems like they have commercials now after every kickoff. They didn’t used to have commercials at that point.