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Originally Posted by djtestudo
Actually, only basketball has the breaks built in (through the "official's timeouts"). Football's quarters, halves, and two-minute warnings have nothing to do with commercials. Neither do baseball's innings or hockey's periods (although I don't know the rules of hockey that well, so there might be something I haven't noticed).
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Next time you're at an NFL game, look for a guy down on the sideline wearing huge orange gloves. He'll be on the home side. He's an official, and he dictates when you can take a commercial break during regulation time. Football has this rule written in because NFL games constitute no more than 15 hours of television a week, yet all of the games are televised. Every game draws a gigantic audience (regular season games many times draw as many viewers as most other sports' playoff games.) Therefore, for the NFL and the networks to generate as much ad revenue as these other sports, they need to be more concerned with the television slice of the pie, soley due to the density of the schedule.