I have never figured out the complexity of shortening football and baseball games. It used to take less than 3 hours to play an NFL game, then they double the amount of commercials time and could not figure out why it then took longer. So they wrote rules to reduce the number of plays and shortened the time to play a game. Then then started adding more commercials.
Baseball, same thing. It used to be hustle in hustle out. 90 seconds, 3 commercials. Then they started adding commercials to the time between innings. Now we have about 5 minutes between innings for commercials, so we have to speed up play. As soon as they get enough time shaved off the average game time we will go to 6 then 7 minutes between innings and have the same conversation.