Clocks will run after first downs in college football with NCAA set to change.
The NCAA Football Rules Committee said Friday that it was recommending changes to first down procedures and timeouts as it looks for ways to speed up football games. Game length has been an ongoing issue in college football with many FBS games taking over 3.5 hours to complete without overtime involved.
I absolutely HATE this.
April 21st, 2023 at 12:57 PM ^
Good, do it
Do it or don’t.
I’m not a fan of different rules at different points in the game.
I guess hockey has done it unofficially for years with the most inept officials in all of sports changing their interpretations of rules and penalties towards the end of games, but that’s a different rant for a different day.
There is nothing wrong with the game & play clocks.
There is much wrong with the commercial times.
Exactly. The problem is that NCAA’s priority has become to preserve their money instead of the game. Cutting down on actual game time and strategy while preserving commercials is just one more way they continue to chip away at our enjoyment and the sanctity of the game. Hate this rule and any rules that aim to cut down on length of games without solving the actual problem.
This is treating the symptom, not the illness.
It’s not even treating it. We get less football and the same amount of ads. Treatment is supposed to make you feel better.
Both of you are correct and it's because of the ad/commercial and promos run during these time outs. Yea, I don't like a kick-off/commercial combo. The play stoppages are OK if they are only a minute in length but when go 5 full minutes, it get ridiculous. Reviewing plays should be no more than 1 minute. Was it a catch or no catch, a targeting on not, a TD where the ball broke the plane at the goal line or not; need not take 3-5 minutes to decide.
Maybe the commercials for products are OK but when these networks pile on promos for upcoming shows, it gets out of hand.
The new rule changes for MLB has shortened their games by a full 30 minutes or more. If the CFB can do the same then I am all in. The point is, this may shorten these games by maybe 15 minutes or so and end being no big deal. It's all about the $$$ and we all know that.
April 21st, 2023 at 11:18 PM ^
This is just a tangent rant, but when announcers in, for instance, playoff football games, spend time after time promoting next week's playoff games (or the upcoming Super Bowl), it drives me insane. You're talking to people who are already watching this game! You think we don't know the Super Bowl is coming up, or won't be able to find the right channel?
Who are those promos for?! It's like if they think they allow four seconds of dead air we'll all get bored and turn the channel. For the love of God ...
When your engine dies do you change the tire?
No, you fix the fucking problem.
The problem the NCAA should be fixing is the ridiculous amount of commercials.
April 21st, 2023 at 12:58 PM ^
This is the wrong way to shorten a game. Less football with the same amount of ads.
Terrible decision here.
Nothing gets me pumped in the first quarter of a game like the 15th ad for DraftKings Casino!!
Then when a (NFL) player uses the casino, they are kicked out of the NFL for a year. Makes sense!
That's a complete non-sequitur and also mischaracterizes the original event.
Jameson Williams agrees.
Too soon?
Or Dr. Pepper 🙄
Same amount of ads?
Perhaps with the reduced football time, there will be fewer TDs, XPs, changes of possession, reviews, kickoffs, and other ad-inducing events.
Still, the game will be shorter by purposely shortening the football game time rather than purposely shortening the not-fooball game time.
I know someone's gonna do the math after the season to prove this out- Is it actually a shorter amount of time from kickoff to when the 4th quarter gets to 0:00? Or is it the same window with less football and more commercials?
I'll bet we know the answer
We've been down this road many times before, and what's happened in the past is that the window is shorter at first, but expands over time and in a few years we'll be looking for new rules to change to make the games shorter.
April 21st, 2023 at 10:41 PM ^
This is exactly right. They have done this before, as the clock used to always stop while the chains reset. Then they started doing it only at the end of halves to shorten the games. Now they want to do in total, all for fucking commercials. They’ve almost completed their death by 1000 cuts of taking all the character out of CFB and turning it into the NFL. Superconferences, a 12 team playoff, endless commercials, conference championship games, shitty OOC schedules. The only thing really keeping me interested is Harbaugh’s paradigmatic difference from every other coach. If we had Lincoln Riley or some other generically good coach, I don’t know if I’d even watch.
April 21st, 2023 at 11:23 PM ^
They just won't allow us to sink into a game. It's brief assaults on the senses (on TV), with yelling (Gus Johnson), immediate and critical replays, followed by the same, then commercial commercial commercial. At no point are we allowed to just ... sit, relax, and enjoy the game.
Even at the game, it's: Loud rock or hip-hop music on the scoreboard! DJs! Flyovers!
I understand, they think that they need to justify some of the cost of those tickets with sensory assault, but ... damn, I wonder if people younger than 50 can even imagine the fun and ... relative simplicity of fall Saturdays at Michigan Stadium (before it was called "the Big House") in the 1970s?
Liberty Liberty Liberty
Liberty
Congrats on your 83 upvotes, I wish I said that at 12:57.
April 21st, 2023 at 12:58 PM ^
RIP, the 4th Qtr Comeback.
OTOH, fewer plays during the game may lead to underdogs winning slightly more often.
Yeah it never happens in the NFL
If I wanted to watch the NFL, I'd watch the NFL.
not to speak for someone else, but i think the point was that the clock rules in the nfl haven't killed comebacks.
Yes, but they way the NFL officiates and relies far more on passing plays allows for comebacks. His point still has merit. An NFL style clock leads to a more NFL style college game and wants to watch college football for the different experience. I am apt to agree. I find the NFL to be extremely boring.
I generally dislike rules that change the game based on amount of time in the game so I don’t have a problem with running the clock after the first down. What I hate is the reasoning for it when a much better option would be reducing commercials and banning a commercial, kick, commercial sequence
Commercial kick commercial is the worst, after a TD a reply or two, extra point and following kick offs should be split screen with a commercial
The commercial, kick, commercial has to go.
Didn't college basketball get slightly better with that re: media timeouts last year or two years ago, so if a team calls a timeout around the time of the scheduled media timeout, it just replaces the media timeout so you don't get time out/commercial, 10 seconds of game time, media timeout/commercial. Too bad college football is only focused on speeding up the actual game instead of making the game more palatable for the viewer
The clock still stops after a first down inside 2 minutes of each half.
Having the game operate one way for 36 minutes and a different way for 4 minutes is the kind of dumb ass shit the NCAA has perfected. Heaven forbid they just limit the number & duration of commercial breaks.
I think most fans watching on TV would be more than happy with split screen or overlay ads during transition points in the game with fewer overall commercial breaks. I know the people in the stadium would love it.
The real heart of the problem is the coaches also love all the commercial breaks and they have one of the loudest voices in the rules committee. They are basically free extended timeouts.
The NFL seems to have the split screen commercial break nailed down pretty well. I don't know why college hasn't figure out they can do the same and keep the game moves. Buncha morons
Don’t give them any ideas. You know this would only increase the amount of commercials right? They wouldn’t decrease actual commercial time but would also do side by side advertising while we are watching the game.
Reminds me of that scene in “Ready player one” where they talk about how they can sell ~85% of the screen before inducing seizures. This is the same approach except they don’t care about causing seizure lol.
What about the other 20 minutes?
“Having the game operate one way for 36 minutes and a different way for 4 minutes…” Don’t they already do this with the clock for out of bounds plays? Clock doesn’t stop until near the end of the half/game I believe.
Which is also stupid.
April 21st, 2023 at 10:32 PM ^
What's happening during the other 20 minutes?
April 21st, 2023 at 10:46 PM ^
I wouldn’t. I tape all the games because I can’t fucking stand commercials. I’d rather pay $50 and get the game on pay per view without commercials. I wish that were an option. I intentionally never support the companies that advertise. That’s all fans have to do and we’ll be rid of it. When I lived abroad I used a pirated feed through some gambling site and it was great, a no-commercial feed. The only problem was I had to watch on a computer.
Hey NCAA, maybe don't be so money hungry and have 14 commercial breaks a quarter, that might speed up the games just a tad....Guarantee the games last just as long but the NCAA replaces the saved time with more commercials.
Of course they’ll run more ads. They need to keep the problem in place so they can think of more ways to replace football with ads after next season.
Yeah. Only a matter of time until kickoffs are gone completely, we shorten the “quarters” to 12 minutes, and they only allow 9 players on defense to speed up drives.
Only a matter of time until there’s four hours of ads and the games are decided at the coin toss.
i get what you're saying, but the ncaa isn't really responsible for the ads. it's the conferences and their tv contracts...which is why the "whooo-eeee, lookit how much money we make from our tv contract" thing is pure fools' gold.
True, they probably profit from some sort of trickle up effect from each school and conference.
Yeah but each conference has its own deal. Some are vastly different depending on the market. The NCAA is the only organization that still (kind of) governs the sport. The conferences have a ton of power here. They could easily say, “no, we aren’t changing the game” and literally nothing would change. Everyone would still make tons of money and the cost of commercial time would only increase in value. As usual, the NCAA and the conference have taken a short sighted and weak approach.
Maybe cut the 90+ minutes of commercials...this new rule is stupid.
Amazing how the problem is always the game itself, and never the 1,000 ad breaks between a touchdown and the next team's possession...
You want to speed up the game? How bout you work with networks to set a mandatory limit on commercials per quarter, increasing the cost per ad, instead of reducing the amount of actual fucking football being played
If you think of football not as a game but as a mechanism for the delivery of advertising messages to television viewers this will all make more sense.