I can’t hold this in any more. I try to be diplomatic about college football, and I really, honestly enjoy the sport and the culture that surrounds it, but seriously, why does it have to take so long?

When you win, and when with each game you see your team climbing up the rankings, it seems easier to justify all the time you spend not only not doing that assignment due next week, but simply not doing anything much at all. The weekend that was wiped out traveling to and from the USC game and the dollars spent on car rental and gas were worth it because not only was it the most exciting game of football I’ve ever seen, but we won. The long journey home didn’t seem quite so bad knowing that when I got back I’d have a great story to tell.

But when you lose? When you’re not enjoying yourself, the time always drags by and you start to wonder why you spend so much time in sports stadiums—as a fan, you are never guaranteed success, and even when things are going well, at some point failure will always catch up with you. As the game wore on against Oregon on Saturday and as Stanford failed to seize on any mistakes made by the Ducks to force itself back into the contest, I did a lot of soul-searching.

Hoping to get the full experience, I’d shown up at about 1 p.m. to tailgate—I admit the thought of starting even earlier at 5 a.m. for GameDay was too daunting a prospect—and then headed across to the stadium two hours later. Already the line of students waiting for the gates to open seemed to stretch to the horizon, and by the time I actually got inside I was very much done with standing around. But looking up to the scoreboard the clock was lit up with the numbers seven and five; before even seeing a single bit of action we would have to last an hour and 15 minutes. A friend of mine, far more savvy than I, had brought a book; I was deeply jealous.

At Big Game two years ago, it was even worse. To have any hope of finding reasonably good seats and being able to sit next to my friends, I had to get inside almost two hours prior to kickoff.

Though exhausted from the waiting, when a game finally starts, the adrenaline kicks back in and pretty much everyone is on their feet for the first quarter. Lasting through almost four hours, though, and cheering on your team the whole way through is no mean feat. Doing that after having already been on your feet for around four hours beforehand is a real struggle, and when frustration adds to the tiredness it’s hard to keep the volume up.

For me this game was an eight-hour ordeal for a sport that just takes 60 minutes of play, and for which a significant portion of that playing time is eaten up in the 25 seconds between downs. The fiasco over resetting the game clock and play clock in the fourth quarter just rubbed salt into my tired wounds. In comparison, the average soccer game includes 90 minutes of nearly constant play and takes less than two hours including halftime and stoppages. Perhaps this is why after I hit the two-hour mark my exhausted voice falters, and I struggle to keep cheering on the home side and jeering the opposition.

Football seems to me a perfect game for TV: the ample breaks in play supply plenty of time to fit in some ads, a smattering of commentary and analysis and maybe the chance of flipping back and forth between other games. But these pauses aren’t so ideal for the fans in the stadium. With an average of 150 plays per college game—and assuming there is a 25-second break between each—you are looking at an hour of nothing. Add in commercial breaks and that’s another hour lost. Any way to trim down that vacuum would be nice; cutting up to 10 seconds of the play clock could reduce the time by almost half an hour, and with less time devoted to ads perhaps another 30 minutes could be salvaged.

But while time-keeping might be out of the hands of the Department of Athletics, that doesn’t mean the experience couldn’t be kept shorter and sweeter. It might be no different a situation than in other grounds, but I can’t help feeling that if Stanford prioritized those physically present, the team might just get a little more of that home-field advantage that perhaps could have made a difference on Saturday.

There was really little reason to open the gates an hour and a half before kickoff. You could cut that time to 45 minutes and still easily get everyone seated in time to stand up for the national anthem. The price of food and drink inside is also ridiculous; stopping people from bringing in their own drinks and then charging so much is nothing short of profiteering. Tailgating becomes a necessity because filling up inside will break the bank, and staying motivated when your team is struggling isn’t helped by hunger and thirst.

Instead of a better fan experience, what did we get? Just a free T-shirt given out by one of Stanford’s sponsors, a bank that clearly knows so much about the Cardinal that it decided to give out white T-shirts.

The inner college football fan in Tom Taylor poked his head out for a while but instantly retreated at the first sign of hardship. Teach Tom the definition of “fair-weather fan” at tom.taylor “at” stanford.edu.