When to turn the game on: the last 5 minutes, sport by sport
Most nights I can't watch a whole game. What I can do is turn one on late, if I know when "late" is. So I went through our own data to answer a plain question: in the best games this fall, when did they actually get good?
The short answer is later than you'd think. In most sports, nine in ten of the best games did their best work in the last five minutes, or after regulation. Baseball is the exception, and it's an interesting one.
What I measured
The Lineup Is keeps an opinion of every game while it's live: how worth watching it is right now. For each game we also keep the moment that opinion was highest, along with the period and the game clock at that moment. I call that the peak.
I took every finished game since September 1 that cleared our bar for worth watching, then kept the sports with a complete record for each game: start, end and peak. That left eight groups and 789 games: the NFL, college football, the NBA, men's and women's college basketball, the NHL, MLB, and soccer across every competition we cover.
For each game I worked out where the peak sat in game time, not on the wall clock. A peak with 4:00 left in the fourth quarter of an NFL game is 93% of the way through regulation. In baseball I counted half-innings; in soccer, minutes out of 90. Peaks in overtime, extra innings, extra time or a shootout went in their own bucket.
One adjustment matters. Ratings here use our scoring as of November 12, which gives regular-season overtime and early upset leads less weight than it used to. Games that went long are still a big part of some samples, hockey especially, so I split games decided in regulation from games that went to extra time and looked at each separately.
What it doesn't tell you
The peak is when our view of the game was highest. That's close to when it got good, but it isn't a play-by-play. It won't tell you the pick-six happened at 3:12; it tells you the game was at its best around then. Soccer minutes in particular are approximate.
These are also the best games, not all games. A blowout has no moment worth turning on for, and this doesn't help you find one. And a tight game is always more gripping with two minutes left than with twenty, so some of this result is built into the question. The useful part is how much, and how it differs by sport.
The results
| Sport | Games | Decided in regulation: peak in the last 5 minutes | Went to extra time: peak came in it |
|---|---|---|---|
| NFL | 68 | 98% | 11 of 12 |
| College football | 120 | 90% | 16 of 18 |
| NBA | 45 | 100% | 7 of 7 |
| Men's college basketball | 32 | 91% | 9 of 10 |
| Women's college basketball | 20 | 100% | 2 of 2 |
| NHL | 49 | 90% | 18 of 18 |
| Soccer | 322 | 96% from the 80th minute | 27 of 28 |
| MLB | 133 | About 7 in 10 in the 9th inning* | 18 of 18 |
*MLB excludes 25 games whose peak our data records at first pitch.
Across all eight groups, 105 of the 110 games that went past regulation peaked after it. Those peaks were timed before the November 12 change, but the new scoring still puts overtime just ahead of a tied finish in regulation, so the pattern holds. If a good game goes to overtime, overtime is the good part. It sounds obvious, but it's the strongest pattern in the data.
Football
The NFL is the most predictable sport here. Of 56 games decided in regulation, 54 peaked in the last five minutes of the fourth quarter and 87% in the last two. The first three quarters of a great NFL game are almost never where it was great.
College football is looser. Eighty percent of regulation games peaked in the last two minutes, but about one in twenty peaked before the fourth quarter even started. Big swings happen earlier in the college game, and comebacks start from further back.
Basketball
College basketball is the tightest finish in the data. In men's games decided in regulation, the median peak came with less than 20 seconds of game time left in the second half, and 82% came in the final two minutes. Women's college basketball looks much the same: 89% in the last two minutes of the fourth. Both samples are small this early in the season.
The NBA spreads out a little more. Nearly all of its regulation games peaked in the last five minutes, but only 73% in the last two. NBA games tend to get good with four or five minutes left and stay good, rather than coming down to one possession.
Hockey
Eighteen of the 49 NHL games went past regulation, and every one of them peaked in overtime or the shootout. Of the 31 decided in regulation, 90% peaked in the last five minutes of the third. That's a small sample, so treat it as a lean, not a law.
Soccer
For games settled in 90 minutes, 61% peaked at the 90th minute or in stoppage time and another 35% between the 80th and 89th. Only 4% peaked before the 80th. In cup ties that went to extra time, 27 of 28 peaked in extra time or penalties.
Baseball
Baseball follows the same pattern, with one caveat about our data. For 25 MLB games our record puts the peak at the very start, which says more about how those games were logged than about baseball, so I left them out. Of the rest decided in nine innings, about seven in ten peaked in the 9th and most of the others in the 8th. A baseball game that looks great at first pitch can still be settled early, but the close ones come down to the last two innings.
If you only have time for the end
- NFL: turn it on with five minutes left in the fourth quarter. Tonight's NFL games.
- College football: turn it on at the start of the fourth quarter. Five minutes left catches most of it, but you'll miss the comebacks.
- NBA: five minutes left in the fourth.
- College basketball: five minutes left, men's or women's. You can cut it closer than in any other sport. Tonight's college basketball.
- NHL: five minutes left in the third, and if it's tied, don't leave.
- Soccer: the 80th minute. In a cup tie that's level, stay for extra time.
- MLB: the top of the 8th. If it's a playoff game, catch the first pitch too.
- Every sport: if it's going to overtime, that's the part to see.
Our take
This is why I built close-game alerts. They don't ask you to remember the minute. They tell you when a game is close in the final minutes or heading to overtime, and the rule for each league is on our game alerts page. The data above is the case for that design: the good part of a good game is almost always its final minutes or overtime, so one buzz at the right time is worth more than three hours of half-watching.
I'll rerun these numbers once the NBA, NHL and college basketball seasons have more games in them. Baseball and hockey are where I expect the picture to shift most.
The Lineup Is is an iPhone app that ranks every game by whether it's worth watching and tells you when one gets good.
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