Talk:Two-minute warning
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[edit] History?
Does anyone have information on the history of the two minute warning? My understanding is that it had to do with timekeeping issues in the early days of the NFL. Scoreboard clocks were not official (nor were they very accurate). Official time was kept by stopwatch. The officials informed each side at two minutes to avoid any surprises at the final gun. Does anyone have the facts?
→The facts are very simple and they have nothing to do with timekeeping on the field or in the pressbox and everything to do with money. In the late 1960s/early 1970s ABC had paid big money to obtain rights to the NFL and specifically their Monday Night Football broadcasts. ABC Sports' Roone Arledge sought every opportunity to increase the number of commercials aired during a football telecast in order to increase revenue and when that wasn't enough he invented the two minute warning as a sure-fire way to obtain a stoppage of play twice a game, every game so that more ads could air. The NFL went along and eventually the two minute warning was part of the rulebook. As time progressed reliance on the two minute warning as, effectively, a fourth timeout increased, especially among teams that were attempting to come from behind or conserve time on the clock.
I have not inserted this information into the main article as I don't have full citations (yet) but "Monday Night Mayhem," a history of Monday Night Football and ABC Sports in general, has details. --Countryroads (talk) 22:39, 5 December 2007 (UTC)
