I believe many Americans are puzzled as to why the National Football League isn’t embraced by the rest of the planet. That is,  when Americans consider the rest of the planet, which we don’t do as often as we should.

Well, after three months of seeing lots of soccer and rugby … I can confirm what we have heard in the past: Football is too slow. And getting slower, I am convinced.

I’m sitting here in the Wan Chai apartment, late Tuesday morning, trying to watch the Bears and Packers on Monday night, live, from frozen Chicago. And in the half-hour I’ve had the television on, covering the final five minutes of the first half, the two teams between them ran maybe 15 plays. Maybe. Might have been fewer.

Back in the States, we have become so conditioned to televised football games being chopped up by long stretches of inaction that we hardly notice how badly a game can c-r-a-w-l.

Sixty minutes of real time on the pro and college clocks, a minimum of three hours of game time in the NFL, and more like four hours (and up) in college football.

The ratio of action to inaction … is actually quite low.  Astonishingly low. And anyone who hasn’t grown up with it … is going to find it really quite dull.

College football is worse when it comes to rules-based clock-stopping — all those frozen-in-time move-the-chains stoppages that come with every first down.

But the NFL is far, far worse for overall breaks in action.

There is the commercial imperative, of course. The most powerful of all. It mandates long breaks in games to bombard viewers with advertising. And we just sit there and take it and hardly notice and rarely complain.

Then factor in the NFL’s massively legalistic preoccupation with “getting plays right” — and there goes scads more time. Instant replays. Looking at some eventually inconsequential play from 15 angles — while nothing that actually moves the game ahead happens. If I were an NFL fan (and I wasn’t, even before I came over to Hong Kong), I would be tempted to sit with a stopwatch, next time I watch an NFL game, and keep track of how much real time is wasted by officials waiting for cameras to tell them what they were supposed to have seen in real time. It has to be at least 15 minutes per game.

(Revolutionary idea: Why have officials on the field at all?  Just have a couple of guys sit in a TV room, in the press box, with every camera angle, and they can call down to the field and tell ball boys where to spot the football. And the officials can keep the clock themselves, right there in the press box. Instead of, what, eight or nine accountants and high school teachers out there trying to keep up, being second-guessed every couple of plays, we could have three guys in a booth and clear the field of those old guys.)

And players getting hurt. That’s the other time-sucking, action-killing aspect of football. A guy goes down, and there goes another two minutes. Or five. And I don’t want to minimize the potential danger of some injuries (I’m on record suggesting everyone ought to be ready for a fatality during an NFL game),  but when a guy clearly is not at risk of paralysis … how about getting him off the field in a timely fashion?

Anyway, this all becomes clearer when you spend an hour or so per day, for three months,  watching soccer and rugby. Two sports with pretty much continuous action.

Soccer, yes, you can legitimately complain about the lack of scoring. Any sport that features a significant percentage of 0-0, 1-0 and 2-0 results (maybe 60-70 percent of the outcomes in Italian soccer? Half, in England?) isn’t giving fans enough scoring.  Sure, eventually you come to appreciate the threat of scoring, but it takes quite a bit of exposure to the sport before you do.

And you might have a bit of a case if you suggest that the constant action in rugby takes away from the strategy and set-piece planning that is one of the attractions of football.

But I will trade low scores (in soccer) and a lack of situational planning (in rugby) in exchange for action that goes unchecked for 30-45 minutes at a crack.

Rugby, also, is at least as violent as American football, and those guys are wearing basically no protective equipment.

Have you ever heard the stories about how the NFL is semi-popular in, say, England … and then we send a game over there, and everyone in the stands is stunned at how slowly it all unfolds? That’s because the NFL makes entry into overseas markets with highlights packages. And if you boil out the 90 percent of “nothing going on” that makes up an NFL game, and string together the great plays — you can have a heck of an entertaining package.

Then the Europeans, weaned on soccer and rugby, see an American football game in real time … and they begin to nod off.

It’s true. Football, American football, is too slow. And getting slower. It will never conquer the world. It doesn’t move quickly enough to accomplish it.