This season football added the two minute timeout before the end of both the first and second halves of games. I surmise the ultimate reasoning was to add six minutes of marketable advertiding time to each game…
If so, that rule change created 402 minutes of commercial time to sell during just the regular season. That’s nearly 7 hours.
How much revenue did this rule change generstr for the networks?
A lot.
Nah, alot alot
None. The addition of the two minute timeout was to give the networks a standardized TV break each half. Instead of having to guess when their ~16 commercial breaks would be throughout the game, they now know exactly where two would be and have a little more flexibility on stopping for the other 14. The result should have been less back to back timeout breaks sandwiching a kickoff or 3 and out possession.
Did that work out? It seems like we got at least as many 3 minute time outs as any other year plus the two minute time outs.