Start the clock

So in the spirit of our ever-evolving game of football, I have a rule proposal of my own: the time-in.

If you’ve ever noticed that football games slow to a predictable crawl at the end of each half, the time-in is the rule for you. The idea is simple: When the clock is stopped, for whatever reason, a coach could call a “time-in,” and force the clock to start up again. Think of it as the antimatter version of the timeout.

The time-in is so powerful that I recommend it be strictly rationed: each team would get only one time-in per season. The possibility of a sudden time-in would loom large in every coach’s mind at the most tense points in the game, introducing just enough concern and uncertainty to make the game different. Timeworn clock-management strategies would no longer be a given. And yet, for the average viewer on a Sunday, the game on the field would still be your father’s football.

You might be thinking this is a bit of an overstatement - that such a small innovation couldn’t really make so much difference in the game. To understand why it is so powerful, we need to realize something important about football: Although we often think of it as a game of territory, it’s really a game of time.

Strategy in football is governed by the march of the clock. Time determines which plays are called; it dictates when players choose to huddle. It’s known among coaches that the clock is the most accurate instrument in the game: the ball spots are imprecise, even when a first down is at stake. But the clock is relentlessly correct. “It’s hard to find a game lost by an inch, but not hard to find games lost because of a second, or even a tenth of a second,” says John T. Reed, author of the book “Clock Management,” the authoritative - and for a long time only - book on time in football.

The coaches’ ability to stop the clock - the timeout - has become a fundamental weapon. It saves as much as 40 seconds in crucial moments of the game, enough time to run a few additional plays. A timeout is, in other words, directly convertible into additional chances at winning.

This is what the time-in would suddenly erase. If it were called, it would force a team to fall back on its wits, perhaps leading to a spectacular improvisation, perhaps killing its hopes on the spot. To quantify how powerful a tool the time-in would be, I ran this idea by Brian Burke, the head of the website Advanced NFL Stats. Burke has developed a computational model that outputs the win-probability for a team over the course of a game. Assuming that it would only be used by the leading team on defense near the end of the game when there’s a small point difference, he found the time-in could produce up to a one-third drop in win probability for the losing team.

Of course, this assumes that the time-in is used that game. If it hasn’t been used yet, it affects the game in a different, but more subtle way: the opposing team will simply have to assume that it might be used. Coaches would enter the realm of game theory: how do we calculate when it’s the best game to use it? And what if the other team is expecting us to think this way?

This recursive series of “ifs” leads down a trail of thinking so complicated that it has a name in philosophy: the Unexpected Hanging paradox. Imagine a prisoner is told that sometime during the next week he will be hanged, and it will be a complete surprise. The prisoner, being part of a philosophical problem, is not scared witless. Instead he calmly reasons thus: I can’t be hanged on Friday, because it’s the final day of the week, and therefore not unexpected. So, I can only be hanged sometime between Monday and Thursday. However, it can’t be Thursday, because now that’s the last possible day to be hanged, and so it won’t be a surprise then either.

Continuing this train of thought, the prisoner coolly deduces that he can’t be hanged any day of the week at all, and therefore will not die. He is therefore quite surprised when he is woken up early on Wednesday and sent to his death.

The time-in would have something of this utter surprise. Its unveiling near the end of a game would be shocking and spectacular. For a fleeting moment, one team is granted a unique power. Its actions jut up against the gods’.

Of course, there is the delicate matter of actually introducing the time-in to football. When I spoke with Dan Reeves, the former head coach of the Broncos, Giants, and Falcons, he was, to say the least, unenthusiastic. Time-out strategy is already so complicated that coaches have to write out their guidelines on a sheet of paper. Reeves was in no rush to make life harder by adding the time-in.

Which brings us to the ultimate question: what is the point of sports? Do we want our teams to follow a series of guidelines that improve their chance of victory? Or do we want excitement? The NBA answered this question in the 1950’s, when winning teams found that the best strategy was to simply dilly-dally and run down the clock. While clearly a good strategy, it sometimes had the unpleasant side effect of preventing anything from happening at all, causing fans to storm out and demand their money back. This precipitated the shot clock, the 24-second countdown designed to ensure that coaches’ incentives to win were in line with the fans’ desire to watch players actually shoot a basketball.

I’d like to think there’s something of the shot clock’s disruptive quality in the time-in. And its impact would linger beyond the game: by adding another variable, it would give people one more thing to anticipate, follow, and argue about. Did a coach err by using his time-in during a crucial moment? Should he have saved it for something more important? These are the things that fans live for, and make sports so much fun to follow. I look forward to arguing about a time-in.

Samuel Arbesman is a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Health Care Policy at Harvard Medical School. He is a regular contributor to Ideas.