The episode presents a detailed narrative on the evolution of TV timeouts in football, led by Darin Hayes and Timothy P. Brown, who examine the critical role these pauses play in the modern viewing experience. The discussion opens with an examination of football's inherent characteristics that make it a television favorite, including its pacing and the strategic breaks that allow viewers to engage with the game without missing the action. Brown provides a historical context, explaining how the adoption of TV timeouts in football mirrored changes in the NBA, where coaches had the option to call timeouts that could be leveraged for commercial breaks. This historical anecdote sets the stage for a broader reflection on how the sport has adapted to television's demands over the decades. The episode encourages listeners to consider the balance between maintaining the integrity of the game and the commercial pressures that dictate viewer experience, ultimately pondering whether the current format still serves the fans or primarily benefits advertisers.

Of course, this story is based on Tim 's Tidbit titled: Birth of TV Timeouts -

Miss our football by the day of the year podcasts, well don't because they can still be found at the Pigskin Dispatch website.

Come join us at the Pigskin Dispatch website to see even more Positive football news! Sign up to get daily football history headlines in your email inbox @ Email-subscriber

Go to SportsHistoryNetwork.com/Row1 for access to the full Row One catalog for gallery prints and gift items. Plus, get a 15% discount on all prints on the Row One Pictorem Gallery with coupon code SHN15.

Get a free one-week subscription to Newspapers.com by visiting SportsHistoryNetwork.com/newspapers. And with a paid subscription, you’ll also be helping to support the production of this and other Sports History Network shows. 

We also feature great music by Mike and Gene Monroe along with Jason Neff & great graphics from time to time from the folks at Gridiron-Uniform Database.

Want more Sports History delivered to your ears, come see this podcast and many more at the Sports History Network - The Headquarters of Sports' Yesteryear!

We would like to thank the National Football Foundation, Pro Football Hall of Fame, On this day.com and Pro Football Reference Websites for the information shared with you today.

We've talked about it many times, how football is the perfect sport for television.

You know, it has the great action and has a great view on your TV screen.

It also has those little breaks where you can go to the can, let the dog out, catch a snack.

And they're also great for advertisers.

The history of the TV timeout is up tonight with Timothy P.

Brown at footballarchaology.com coming up in just a moment.

This is the Pigskin Daily History Dispatch, a podcast that covers the anniversaries of American football events throughout history.

Your host, host Darren Hayes, is podcasting from America's North Shore to bring you the memories of the gridiron one day at a time.

Hello, my football friends.

This is Darren.

He's a pigskindispatch.com welcome once again to the Pig Pen, your portal to positive football history.

And welcome to another edition where we get to visit with our friend Timothy p.

Brown@footballarchaology.com to talk about one of his great tidbits on football history.

Tim, welcome back to the Pig Pen.

Hey Darren, good to see you.

And I will make sure that I do not call timeout during the session.

Yeah, definitely don't want to do that because we're talking about some, some television football, which is probably where most people absorb most of their, their game action.

It's not live anymore.

Like, well, it is live, but we don't watch it as live as much pretty percentage wise probably as we do on, on the television.

And you wrote a very interesting article just recently here called the Birth of TV Timeouts.

So something that we sort of all dread or unless you've been drinking a lot of fluid and you have to use a restroom or when I go grab a sandwich, the TV timeouts are sort of a disappointment sometimes in the game.

You're, you know, especially at the end of the game when you're right in the action.

We're going to go to tv, TV timeout or whatever, but maybe you could tell us the history of this.

Yeah, well, I think TV timeouts are worse if you actually are there to, to observe because it's just an unnatural break in the game.

Right?

Right.

Yeah.

So, you know, if you think about it, when, you know, obviously initially people just attended games, there was no other way to, to see or view or hear about football.

Then we got, then we went to radio and in radio even, you know, if you listen to like a baseball game, you know, the, the announcers will slip in, you know, some comment about the local, you know, Car dealer or, you know, the restaurant or whatever it is.

And, and you know, if you're listening to the game, you don't know what's happening or not, you know, so you're able, you know, they can kind of stop and start telling, you know, a commercial story and just kind of weave it in with their commentary about the game.

Whereas once television came along, then all of a sudden, you know, it's either, you know, they didn't have split screen or anything like that, no score bugs.

So it was either they were either showing the game or they were showing a commercial.

And, but you know, if you're the, the broadcasters, they wanted to make sure that they had enough breaks in a game to show however many commercials they sold for that game.

And so, you know, there were times that they kind of struggled to do that.

And like, if you think about it today, the NCAA and NFL, you know, you generally have eight commercial breaks per half.

You've got one at the end of the first and second quarter and you've got the two minute warnings.

Then beyond that you have commercial breaks when there's following field goal attempts, one or two point conversion attempts, possession changes due to a punt, tickoff or turnover.

You've got injury, injury stoppages, instant replay challenges, and then when teams call timeouts.

But now some of those things didn't exist back in the day.

There were no instant replay challenges there.

You know, back then there wouldn't have been two point conversions either.

But in any event, so there were times when there just weren't enough natural stoppages in play to get all their, all the commercials into a game that they wanted perhaps.

And so the first group to actually implement TV timeouts was the NBA.

They, they did it in their 57, 58 season.

And then, then it got picked up by football in, in 58.

And so let me just return to the, the NBA thing.

What they would do is the coaches had a, you know, had a timeout available to them, but if they didn't call one by a specific time in the, in the half, then the referee would call a timeout and charge it to the team.

So, you know, it wasn't an official timeout, so it was kind of a use it or lose it kind of thing.

And so in football, what they did is they, they basically create, you know, they kind of copied it and they, they said, okay, if there isn't the timeout by 10 minutes into the first or third quarter, then they would call it a commercial timeout.

Now when you think about that Compared to today.

I mean, can you remember the last time that you watched a football game of some kind of national, regional broadcast where it, where there was 10 minutes of elapsed play without a timeout, without a commercial?

I mean, I, you know, I certainly don't remember that, but, you know, maybe when I was a kid it was like that.

But so, I mean, it's just one of.

It's just.

You can't even fathom 10 minutes going by before there was a commercial.

But that was the rule, you know, so it just tells you, number one, they didn't.

They didn't have as many commercials.

Right.

And, you know, but, but even then, at the time that they did that, there was an uproar.

You know, people in the press complained that they were, you know, interrupting the game, it was going to change the flow of the game and all this rigamarole.

And it was kind of like, where does this stop?

You know, are they going to start putting label, you know, brand labels on people's jerseys, which they didn't do for a long time, but now they do.

Yeah.

So, I mean, it's just, it was one of those things where just people just thought it was crazy that they might.

That they'd had commercial breaks interrupting the natural flow of the game.

Right.

And it.

So it's just one of those things that, you know, obviously we're all used to it now, but back when it first happened, it was like, they just thought it was like an indecent act.

Well, I, I can somewhat sympathize with them because, you know, being when I was a high school official, we had a, you know, I had every game.

You know, you don't have TV and radio timeouts.

And so back in the early 90s, one of our local stations decided to put a game of the week on.

They were going to do it on the CBS affiliate.

And they had a guy that had a big orange, like, glove oven mitt, like the color your shirt on there.

And I was the line judge at the time.

So I was on the home side of the field, and their cameras were up in the press box, so they were on that side of the field.

So it was one of my added duties is I had to find.

Every time there was stoppage, I had to look to find where this guy was, you know, besides counting players and coming on the field and, you know, things that pertain to football.

I had to find this guy, see if he was going to raise his hand up in the air to tell us, okay, we had to go into timeout and it was the most awkward thing and we actually got in trouble.

We had a team that was driving and they wanted to do it 12 minute quarter.

They wanted to do it like 4, 4 minute mark and, and the 2 minute mark of each quarter and call timeout somewhere in there where it made sense.

Well, we had a team that was driving and they really didn't.

It was the first time they had momentum all game.

They're, they're going, they're getting themselves back in this game and look over, it's like a ball went out of bounds.

I look over, this guy's raising his hand and I went to the, to look to the referee to tell him to stop the game.

He just shook, he shook me off and he went, the guys starts waving, you know, frantically.

Hey, we got to go on a timeout.

Like we're not stopping, pal.

We're going until, you know, they scored or something.

And we, we let him.

But yeah, he was kind of miffed at us at halftime, but whatever.

Yeah.

Just one other little aspect to this story is that there.

So that was 58, but when they, you know, when the NFL anyways, you know, added commercial timeouts.

Right.

And so that was another one where it was like, I mean, they were all happy because few games were on tv.

So on the one hand a lot of people were happy that it was going to be on tv, but it was like, you're changing our plans.

You know, we always start at 2:00 and they wanted it to start one or whatever it was.

And so, yeah, I mean, it's just one of those things that just what seemed like a really abnormal, you know, intrusion in the game now.

It's like, you know, you got to wait till like a week and a half before the game's played to know is it going to be a day game, a night game, you know, whatever.

Yeah, I think my, my wife is still surprised how much football is on a Saturday when I'm, I'm starting to watch it at noon and you know, game after game and like 10 o'clock.

Oh good, all the games are done.

Oh no, there's the one starting on the west coast now or.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I'm trying to think of the name of the, the site.

I'm going to try to pull it up, but I'M a big fan of CFB Guide.

Yeah.

So it's just CFB Guide.

And so that's what I use, you know, because it's, you know, it just lists, it's got kind of this little picture thing and the time frames and then it updates the scores and, you know, so every, well, basically every night that there's football on or date that there's football on.

That's.

I've always got that up in my, I've got it bookmarked, you know, on my, whatever that little border thing is at the top of your, at the top of the Google page.

So I love me some CFB dot guide.

And you really got to pay attention to it this, this season going on because, I mean, I don't think I've ever had a season where you have a, a big game on at noon.

And we've had a two or three, you know, the, maybe the biggest game, you know, Penn State, Ohio State recently was on at noon, I think.

Would they have somebody near at the beginning of the season it was like Alabama and Georgia, I think was on at noon.

I'm like, man, you have these giant games where usually, you know, that's a 3:30 game or night game and big games on all day long.

So that's great.

That's also a real challenge for the, you know, west, well, west coast fans and even somebody in Ohio or I should say in Hawaii, you know, you wake up at like 6 in the morning or something and you know there's a game on.

You know, the big game for the weekend is starting, you know, getting started.

If it's, you know, east coast time.

And all the games are done at dinner time, though, that'd be, that'd be kind of disappointing too, if you're out there.

Well, that is some, some great stuff and some great research on there on, on something that maybe, you know, we sort of take for granted.

But it is sort of an art and a science to schedule not only at the beginning of the season to get these, you know, sponsors to, to pay for us to watch TV of a sport we love, but also to time them into the games and make the flow of the game be, you know, special and good for the, and fair for the players and everything.

So that's, that's a great job on there.

But you have some really interesting things on football history, all aspects from the TV timeouts to equipment to, to people involved in a game and your tidbits and maybe you could share with the folks where they can take a look at some of these.

Yep.

You know, my site is footballarchaeology.com so just go out there and either just hit the site whenever you want to or subscribe.

And if you subscribe, every time I publish an article, you'll get an email with the contents of that article in there.

So, yeah, that's, that's the best way to do it.

And, you know, let.

Let your.

Let the emails pile up if you want to, or, you know, whatever.

Whatever works for you.

All right.

Well, Tim, we really appreciate you coming on and sharing this great information with us and, and sharing your site with us and letting us get into minds and the history of football, and we'd love to talk to you again next week about it.

Yeah, look forward to it.

Thanks, Darren.

That's all the football history we have today, folks.

Join us back tomorrow for more of your football history.

We invite you to check out our website, pigskindispatch.com not only to see the daily football history, but to experience positive football with our many articles on the good people of the game, as well as our own football comic strip, Cleetmark's comics, pigskindispatch.com is also on social media outlets, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and don't forget the Big Skin Dispatch YouTube channel to get all of your positive football news and history.

Special thanks to the talents of Mike.

And Gene Monroe, as well as Jason.

Neff for letting us use their music during our broadcast.

This podcast is part of the Sports.

History Network, your headquarters for the yesteryear of your favorite sport.

You can learn more at sportshistorynetwork.

Com.