American Football and Timer Management

Happy NFL kickoff! When I was a kid I was obsessed with football, trying every Madden we had¹ and playing flag football every autumn. Last year I got back into it for real after only following from the sidelines for most of my teens and 20’s, and I fell in love with the sport again. Perhaps it’s because it’s the only good real-time-with-pause game, the RPG to beat out all other RPG’s. And it helps that it’s easy for me to do work or play other games during all the stoppages as well!

Out of the many interesting facets of football that seem so far and beyond what most of our video games can offer (the intricacies of pocket movement and ball placement, playing with rhythm and anticipation, micromanaging the trenches, all the different styles of play calls and mindgames between the two sides), there’s been a particularly harmony between the clock in football and recent discussions on timer dynamics in video games. Let’s take a look at how the clock can be manipulated in football and draw some lessons from it for game design.

How Does The Clock Work?

There are two separate clocks that dictate time in an NFL game:

• The game clock tracks the total amount of time left in the current period, or quarter, of a four-period game. The full game is 60 minutes, and each quarter is 15 minutes. The breaks between the first and second quarters and the third and fourth quarters are elongated ad breaks, while the break between the second and third quarter is a ~13 minute “halftime” break. The clock automatically stops at the two-minute marks at the end of the second and fourth period.

• The play clock is a 40 second timer that starts at the end of a play that indicates the maximum time it should take to resume active play.² If the ball is not snapped prior to the play clock running out, a delay of game penalty will be applied to the offense.

Game clock has an interesting quirk that makes it manipulable: the time will stop depending on the way each play ends. In most situations, once the ball is back on the field of play (which may be instant), the referee will motion for the game clock to begin again (the play clock begins at the end of the prior play). However, if the ball is passed and is not received, then the game clock will not begin until the ball is snapped (when it is moved by an offensive lineman and becomes live again) on the next play. The same goes for when a player carrying the ball goes out of bounds under specific conditions.³ If the game clock remains running after a play, the play clock will effectively limit how long the offense can stall before they put the ball in motion again (assuming they aren’t willing to give up yardage on the delay of game penalty).

These rules gives the run game an edge over the pass game when it comes to draining the game clock, as even unsuccessful runs will keep the clock rolling during the pre-snap setup, while the pass game will stop the clock on incomplete passes. The pass game is unquestionably more efficient on a strict point-earning basis, but the ability to draw out possession time and deny the opponent valuable time is one of the many things that makes the run game still relevant in the modern NFL. It can also change the way trailing offenses attack the field during end-game scenarios where preserving the clock is important: although the middle of the field has a wider space to accrue yards after a catch, shooting outside the numbers towards the sidelines gives receivers an easy way to stop the clock by running out of bounds.

Coaches also have more explicit resources to deal when they need to stop the game clock. Each team gets three timeouts per half to use to stop the clock at any time between plays, which also gives a brief period of additional time to communicate with the players.⁴ If timeouts aren’t available, the team can choose to spike the ball on a play in exchange for one of the “downs”;⁵ while intentionally grounding the ball is generally a foul, there’s a special caveat for doing it immediately at the start of a play as an exception for players to manipulate the clock in this way. Both of these have other interactions that the coach needs to keep in mind. If a coach challenges a ruling on the field by the referee, they will lose a timeout if the original ruling is upheld, and thus coaches cannot challenge plays if they have no timeouts remaining. Similarly, losing a down means throwing away a potential play and any field position gained from it.

After his timer management mistake, Hampton got some surprise advice from Marshawn “Beast Mode” Lynch, who was at the game as an official photographer. [src]

A good illustration of some of these timer dynamics came as yesterday’s Chiefs vs. Chargers game approached halftime. With the Chargers in the lead by 7 points and 54 seconds left on the clock, they handed the ball off to rookie running back Omarion Hampton, who promptly took the ball to the outside and ended the play out of bounds, accidentally stopping the clock in the process. After a field goal, this gave enough time for the Chiefs to move the ball down the field. Chiefs quarterback Mahomes managed to get a 38-yard pass to Thornton that died in-bounds, and he quickly spiked the ball after to kill the clock with 22 seconds left. After an incompletion that ate up five seconds, Mahomes got a short route off to Gray, who was pushed out of bounds backwards by cornerback Still on the Chargers. This obscure interaction, where the furthest movement of the ball had occurred in-bounds, and thus the point where the play died was not out of bounds, caused the timer to keep running, with only 12 seconds left. The Chiefs were cognizant of this and immediately lined up for a field goal, managing to get a 59 yarder off and pick up a few extra points before the half ended. We can see here that poor clock management on the part of the Chargers and then strong clock management on the part of the Chiefs (ignoring some rookie false starts thrown in the mix) managed to convert a very short amount of time into a field goal drive, even when one of the Chargers’ cornerbacks was able to drain the clock with only seconds to go.

What Can We Learn From This?

Although football has much more complex timer rules than most games we play, and its timers are run live by human operators instead of being driven by an algorithm, there’s still some basic concepts we can take from it in order to help make our timers more meaningful.

Multiple Timers Can Overlap

The intersection between the game clock and the play clock in football frames both short-term and long-term actions under the overall timer separately, which also allows the offense to perform long-term manipulation in chunks by considering what they’re able to do in the short term; this can manifest in stalling as mentioned earlier, or as a no-huddle offense if the goal is to move the chains as quickly as possible.

Consider Crazy Taxi, which also has two timers: an overall timer that constrains the length of the game, and individual customer timers that dictate how long you have to get a specific customer to their destination. Picking up a customer actually puts more time on the overall timer as well as starting the customer timer, and beating the customer timer by a specific duration will give an additional bonus to the overall timer. This helps sequence the game into individual segments based on the customers but also bleeds back into long-term play as well. If a particular customer segment goes poorly, it might be time to spam easy, low-distance customers to rack up some extra bonuses before taking off on a longer customer. It also goes hand in hand with the score play; the player can spend more time racking up their combo in the short term, but it runs the risk of losing them the bonus that comes with speedy delivery.

Even good players will drop a speedy bonus every once in a while, and knowing how to quickly make up some lost time from the customers around you is an essential skill for high-level Crazy Taxi play. [src]

Timers Should Interact with Other Mechanics

Everything that engages with the timer in an NFL game touches other aspects of the game as well. The resources that one can use to stop the timer, timeouts and downs, are valuable for reasons outside of their use in timer management, especially the latter, which directly removes chances for the offense to move the ball when expended. Likewise, timer management is also spatially oriented thanks to how the bounds of the field affect timer stoppages. This changes the way a team will approach the field depending on whether they want to rush their play or drain as much time as possible, and this likewise influences how the defense will account for their options.

Consider the special worlds of Super Mario 3D Land. While initially the low-timer stages have timer extension pickups lying around in the open, they eventually switch to putting them inside of enemies. This means that to extend the timer, a necessity in most of these levels, where the timer starts with only 30 seconds, you’ll have to engage with the enemies and the terrain around them rather than taking the fastest possible route at every opportunity. This example works especially well because the enemies themselves are (lightly) dynamic, so while a particular route can constructed, there still needs to be wiggle room to account for an enemy doing something a bit different than you were expecting or engaging with a terrain cycle in a way that disrupts the route.

Negative Outcomes vs. Positive Ones

In many games with a timer, especially competitive games, stalling becomes a major consideration due to overcentralizing results on the timer ending, especially if points can be earned passively in place, or if points can be withheld from an opponent. The concept of the play clock in football (and other sports too, most notably basketball and modern baseball) helps penalize this behavior, and can lead to interesting dynamics of its own when it intersects with other mechanics.

Consider Nex Machina: while timing isn’t essential for survival in the same way as other games, score play has to consider both the overall time spent and the human combo. The latter relies on the player to pick up human survivors to renew the combo timer, giving them boosts to their overall combo multiplier in the process. Many other score-play games have similar chaining mechanics with timers as well. These use negative outcomes associated with the timer to make the player operate within its confines, trying to squeeze as much juice as they can out of the time without letting it fade or without using up all of their potential for combo extensions too early. Compare this to a cooldown mechanic for a weapon or special move, which will reward the player with access to a tool once they wait for the timer to finish. The former seems negative, but incentivizes engagement, while the latter is positive but discourages it, especially in systems where cooldown moves yield points (such as Final Fantasy XVI).

Hopefully this gave you a different way to think about timer management in some of your favorite games! Football is finally back…