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At 28mm scale, a football field, including endzones, would be an impressive but manageable 5'6" by 2'5". The basic movements -- throwing, catching, running, tackling -- are the sorts of things that would be well-simulated, and distances and percentages are easily researched, so working out dice tables should be fairly simple.
The main problem would be time scale. You'd really want a 1-second per turn scale, so you could actually play out pressure on the QB (the QB would have a very low pass completion rate on an immediate throw, which would go up the longer he had to aim; the defensive tackles would be trying to form a pocket in which the QB could stay, protected for long enough to aim well), catching and tackling running backs, rushing punters, and so forth. But that would make a game three thousand six hundred turns, which seems excessive. It would take at least a week to play a game.
A ten-second round SOUNDS more reasonable -- but an average play lasts somewhere around 4 seconds. So a 1-second round is really the best option.
What would bring this back into the realm of plausibility is that actual play time in a football game is only about 10% of clock time, which would mean that you're really only playing an epic but plausible 360 turns. At 1 minute per turn, you're looking at six hours -- long, but not outside what gamers are willing to do.
Edited to Add: A couple days after posting this, my friend Ben and I were talking about it, and he pointed out the fatal flaw that makes this absolutely impossible the way I was thinking about it. Every turn, every second of play, involves moving twenty-two figures, eleven on each side. So that "360 turns" is actually nearly eight thousand moves. Moving twenty-two figures in a turn is NOT going to mean "1 minute per turn". Maybe half an hour per turn, at the very least. So -- 180 hours for a game. Your single game is going to last six months -- as long as the actual football season.
The main problem would be time scale. You'd really want a 1-second per turn scale, so you could actually play out pressure on the QB (the QB would have a very low pass completion rate on an immediate throw, which would go up the longer he had to aim; the defensive tackles would be trying to form a pocket in which the QB could stay, protected for long enough to aim well), catching and tackling running backs, rushing punters, and so forth. But that would make a game three thousand six hundred turns, which seems excessive. It would take at least a week to play a game.
A ten-second round SOUNDS more reasonable -- but an average play lasts somewhere around 4 seconds. So a 1-second round is really the best option.
What would bring this back into the realm of plausibility is that actual play time in a football game is only about 10% of clock time, which would mean that you're really only playing an epic but plausible 360 turns. At 1 minute per turn, you're looking at six hours -- long, but not outside what gamers are willing to do.
Edited to Add: A couple days after posting this, my friend Ben and I were talking about it, and he pointed out the fatal flaw that makes this absolutely impossible the way I was thinking about it. Every turn, every second of play, involves moving twenty-two figures, eleven on each side. So that "360 turns" is actually nearly eight thousand moves. Moving twenty-two figures in a turn is NOT going to mean "1 minute per turn". Maybe half an hour per turn, at the very least. So -- 180 hours for a game. Your single game is going to last six months -- as long as the actual football season.