It seems to me television programmers between college and professional football there would be at least 1,000 games per year which would provide the necessary data points for understanding how long these games typically last. Yet, consistently the games which start on time still run about an hour or more longer than the 3 hour time slots allocated. The programmers understand this enough to schedule the games four hours apart and schedule a post-game review in this period just in case it ends early. Just include that as part of the original “episode” since you include the same announcers in the pre-game.

The TV schedule should make it convenient to know what program is on when. Inaccuracy of the data leads to distrust. (Got a weird deja vu moment writing that.)

Mostly though this is about knowing what to schedule on my DVR. Soccer time slots generally are set for 2 or 2.5 hours so I typically extend them to 3 hours. A half hour or hour are available options. The only time I’ve been burned by this is an LA Galaxy game where there was a couple power outages. (American) Football consistently burns me.