Rumor has it
New rule stinks
By Brian Hansen, sports editor
Posted on September 14, 2006

JMU’s Mickey Matthews doesn’t like it. Texas’ Mack Brown hates it.  Florida’s Urban Meyer is disappointed with it.

What has these coaches so upset? It’s not their red zone offenses or their early-season struggles. It’s the new clock rule put in by the NCAA in order to shorten games.

The new rule, instituted this year, now has the clock starting earlier in two instances. The first is when a team is kicking off, the clock now starts when a kicker makes contact with the ball as opposed to when the receiving team catches it. The other change has to do with the clock now starting when the ref blows the “ready for play” whistle as opposed to on the snap of the ball.

The new rule is being criticized by football coaches throughout the nation. 

“I think it’s a bad rule,” JMU coach Mickey Matthews said. “We only play 11 times and we need to let the kids play as much as they can. The fans want to come watch you play, and the kids want to play and we want to coach them. Why would you want to shorten the game?”

Matthews’s sentiments have been echoed by a number of coaches, including Brown, who felt like the new rules prevented his team from any chance at coming back against Ohio State this weekend. When Ohio State scored to go up by 17 with 6:31 left in the game, the game became out of reach in Brown’s opinion.

Comebacks are one of the things that make college football great. For example, last year’s national championship game between Texas and USC was one of the greatest football games I’ve ever seen, and with the new clock rules, we may not have seen such an exciting game.

The new rule has stripped the game of great comebacks. Think of some of the most memorable college games of all time. Doug Flutie’s touchdown pass to beat Miami as time expired, Matt Leinart sneaking across the goal line as time expired to beat Notre Dame, the famous California-Stanford finish with the band coming out on the field as time expired.

The key phrase in all of those finishes is “as time expired.” Had the new rule been in place, time would probably already have been expired and we never would have seen those great finishes.

This is just another example of the NCAA getting it wrong, hurting the fans and helping the people with the big bank accounts in the process. This is not unlike their decision to go with a BCS formula instead of allowing the athletes to decide it on the field with a playoff system. This time they are accommodating the television stations that air the games, allowing them to show more games and make more money.

In the end, all the NCAA is doing is robbing its fans of a chance to see their favorite teams compete for the full length of a game. They are robbing them of chances to see classic comebacks and surprising finishes.

In the JMU/Bloomsburg game, JMU ran only 44 offensive plays, which was down from the typical 70 to 80 plays you saw last year. Part of that had to do with an anemic offense, but the new time rules play a big part in it also.

Against ASU last weekend, the Dukes were outplaying the Mountaineers in the second half, and who knows if the extra two to three minutes cost them a chance to mount a final comeback. 

The point is, the new rule doesn’t allow players to settle it on the field and it hurts two important groups in the process, the players and the fans.

The coaches and players see this. Why can’t the NCAA?

Brian is a senior SMAD major with a concentration in print journalism.