Baseball used to be the sport of standing around. On offense, players spend most of their time waiting for their turn to bat. And even batting is mostly standing around (accentuated, of course, with the ritual of adjusting one’s batting glove). The defense mostly stands about, too, with their movement mainly a matter of changing where they stand, a decision made for the players by the quants.

But football has of late eclipsed hardball as the sport with the most torpid loitering. And I don’t mean the huddle or even the notorious TV timeout. No, it is the replay that is to blame, that time when the game becomes the ref show, and everyone else is left powerless and slack-jawed for the duration.