The stat you read is flat out inaccurate. There are 60 minutes where the clock is running, and the vast majority of that is with the ball live and in play. I would say something like 45+ minutes out of the 60. Also, in fairness I've been to a couple of NFL games, and the commercial breaks tend to happen when the game clock is paused by the flow of the game anyway (team calls timeout, referees are reviewing a play, and so on). It's uncommon for the game at the stadium to be stopped waiting for the broadcasters to show their commercials.

> The stat you read is flat out inaccurate. There are 60 minutes where the clock is running, and the vast majority of that is with the ball live and in play.

You are completely wrong. I know that's what your intuition feels like from watching games, but if you actually get a stopwatch out and clock it, you'll see it's much closer to op than what you posted. Very close in fact.

If you don't believe it, find a actual game and time it. I did this on a game.

For example from the 8min mark to the 2min warning (6 mins of clock time) there were only 2m15s of action. Only 37.5% of the clock time was action. And that was an extremely conservative time. It was the 4th quarter, had multiple scoring plays, and multiple timeouts - essentially everything possible to do to stop the clock and still it maxed out at < 38% of the clock was actual game time. If you instead do this for a full game (not the end of the 4th quarter), and especially games that aren't close and you'll see it's way less. Definitely not what you're expecting.

Football is a tiny amount of "action time" as compared to "clock time".