How long do college football games last? Exploring the average time from start to finish

If you're taking your family to a college football game, when they ask how long a game lasts, what do you answer them?

How long do college football games last?

Well, the short answer is not the most fun and concise one: It depends. However, there are a few things that are a bit more certain when it comes to NCAA football games.

• The average length of college football games is 3 hours and 24 minutes, according to the NCAA.
• College games are longer than NFL games (we'll get to the specifics of why later)

So many other factors contribute to the overall length of college football games. Compared to NFL games, college games also use the same 60-minute regulation playtime divided into four 15-minute quarters.

Start to finish

From the kickoff, the game clock in each quarter runs down from 15:00 to 0:00. It stops on certain stoppages in play, such as an incomplete pass, a timeout or a replay, among others. During an entire game, these stoppages accrue and add several more minutes to a game's entire runtime.

Here are the biggest factors that contribute further to the length of college games:

• College games have a 20-minute halftime break on any given day. The home team's marching band performs here. Overall, it could add up to an additional 30 minutes to the total runtime, per GameDayCulture. Bowl games can have even longer halftime periods due to the significance of said games along with extravagant halftime productions.
• TV commercials are a normal fixture of college football, especially those which are on national TV. Again, chalk up another 30 minutes to total runtime when these commercials air. There are roughly four TV timeouts every quarter.

Extra rules

A few other extra rules are in place for the college game that can extend games even more. For one, the game clock stops once a team gets its first down. The clock is also stopped during timeouts (obviously), as well as incomplete passes. Not to mention, there are also player injuries, delay of game penalties and replay stoppages.

Lengthy OTs

But how about overtime? In 2018, the NCAA had one of the longest college football games ever: a seven-OT finish between Texas A&M and LSU.

Since then, the NCAA has worked to shorten the overtime periods. So, in 2021, these rule changes were ratified:

• Teams must now attempt two-point conversions during the second OT
• Teams will alternate attempting two-point conversions during the third OT

All in all, these stoppages add up to the over 3-hour average runtime of a college football game. This is insane to think about, considering that if you do the math, an entire college football game will only have roughly 11 minutes of actual action on the field.