September 7, 2006
New NCAA Rules
For those of you who haven’t been paying too much attention to college football yet, there was a major rule change regarding the clock for the 2006 season. In an effort to shorten game time for the TV networks, they’ve decided to start the game clock on changes of possession when the ball is set.
In essense, it has reduced the number of offensive plays in the game by about 15 or so. This completely changes the game, particularly late-game clock management. The potential for exciting late-game comebacks is highly reduced. Time-outs become absolutely crucial, and as was seen in the FSU-Miami game, Miami was forced to take a time-out AFTER PUNTING THE BALL AWAY, which is absolutely ridiculous.
Among fans, players, and coaches, these changes are near-universally despised. It’s been such a change to the game that there is already a web-site taking an online petition to get the NCAA to change the rules back. As far as I’m concerned, if the TV networks want to cut down the game time, they can reduce their number of TV timeouts.
Check out the petition at:
http://www.wehatethenewclockrules.com/
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There are so many things wrong with this rule I can’t list them all. But here are the two biggies…
1) Before this rule, a team that played smart football and conserved their timeouts could punt the ball late, use all three timeouts and get the ball back (assuming they stop the other offense) with no more than 20 seconds or so coming off the clock. Now? At least a minute will be gone, and if that team only had two timeouts, you’re looking at about a loss of at least 90 seconds.
2) The length of game issue was an easy fix, and they screwed it up. Here’s what they should have done:
In college football, the clock stops after each first down until the chains are set if the play did not finish out of bounds. By not stopping the clock, they could save just about as much time. Additionally, if they were really committed to the change of possession clock rule, the least they could do is suspend it during the final three minutes or so of each half.
So the NCAA adds a 12th game and then basically takes it back with these new rules. If you reduce a game’s total plays by an average of 10% then over a year you actual take more than one full game of plays off the board. In addition it’s one full game of playing time coaches will no longer have access to when trying to evaluate 2nd and 3rd string players.
And the game itself will become less exciting in many situations where teams with the lead can milk time/timeouts away from the opponent without even needing to run a play.
I can’t believe a knowledgeble group of NCAA officials could pass these changes. Those people have no foresight what so ever.