Football is BORING...yeah. I said it.

OK, I don't really believe football (the American kind, not the European kind) is that boring. (Perhaps some other day I will officially put in my vote for European Football as the superior sport, but until that day, I will limit this discussion to American Football) However, I AM really tired of hearing that Baseball is SOOOOOOO Boring by football Fans who are either ignorant of baseball, or really just don't know what they're talking about it. The most cited reason that Baseball is so boring is that there isn't any action: that football is ALL ABOUT the action. There are 22 players on the field running and slamming into each other, blah, blah, blah. In baseball everyone stands around until the pitcher throws something the batter feels like putting in play and then someone runs down the ball and we do it all over again. Ignoring the fact that the description is horribly simplistic of the skill and strategy involved in baseball I offer the following incontrovertible facts about the amount of standing around doing nothing in a typical quarter of NFL football:

(first, as a bit of a description, I was at the Colts/Browns game on Sunday Sept. 25, 2005)
Quarter: 2nd
Quarter Length: 15 minutes (extrapolated game: 60 minutes)
Actual Time: 47 minutes (extrapolated game: 3 hours, 8 minutes)
Amount of Time Actually Played: 4 minutes 2 seconds (or: about 1 minute of football for every 10 minutes of standing around doing nothing) (extrapolated: 16 minutes, 8 seconds) - and to answer the inevitable question: yes, I actually timed it with a stopwatch starting from when the ball was snapped to when the player was tackled or the play stopped.
Scoring: Browns - 3 points; Colts - 3 points

So, for a typical football game (there's nothing in this quarter, other than the low-ish score, to indicate that it was an aberation) that last a little over 3 hours, the players are standing around doing not much anything for 2 hours and 44 minutes. You could play most baseball games just during the time that no one is doing anything for a football game.