Expert: Vic Winnek - 9/12/2006

Question
Hi Vic - I appreciate your response. I understand that the information you shared may not actually be your own point of view. Your simple passing on the reason for the changes. So I'll counter some points even though I realize your just the messenger.

Games running into prime time - how many games really do this? Most East Coast games start no later than 3:30pm. Even if they ran 4 hours that puts the end time at 7:30. If the games start later than that they are prime time games anyway so the length shouldn't matter. And realistically the majority of games are now on ESPN or regional sports networks anyway and why would they want to reduce the highest rated shows they air?

I've seen several major college coaches at Tennessee, Oregon, Texas, Texas Tech, South Carolina, just to name a few, who've spoke of who drastically this changes the game we love. None of the future numbers will compare to the past if you shorten the game by 10%! Lets play 16.2 holes of golf. Let's move the basket down to nine feet. Lets bring in all the outfield walls by 30 to 40 feet. Lets only play 8 innings and take away 16 games each season.

So the NCAA can add an extra game that fans have to pay for yet remove an entire games worth of play time from the overall season? Sounds like someone is making out pretty well and that would be the pockets of the NCAA. Let's see how much extra revenue those 12th games everyone play now add to the bottom line of the NCAA. Not to mention all the extra air time and commercials shown in those extra game.

No true college fan, the core audience who watches all these games anyway, cares if a game goes 3:30 hours. But the will care when their team is down by 13 pts with 3 minutes left and no longer has a chance to comeback because one full minute of time will be remove from the clock just by two changes of posession. This will eventually kill the excitement of the last few minutes of the game. These new rules suck.
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Followup To

Question -
I love college football and feel these new rule changes have / will hurt the game on a number of levels. They are reducing total plays by about 10% or more per game. That is very substantial. Plus, the last few minutes of the game, which can be very exciting, will now be less of a factor as teams with the lead can run off subtantial amounts of time prior to even snapping the ball on first down. Who do I start emailing to get the rules changed back to normal for next year.

Answer -
Hi David,
Thanks for your Question.  The NCAA Football Rules Committee is responsible for the new timing rule changes.  If you go to ncaa.org you might be able to contact them.  The rules committee is made up 8 Division 1, 3 Division II and 3 Division III coaches.

I personally agree it hurts the game on several levels.  Professionally, I'd like to wait and see what it does to the game before I have a professional opinion.  There are several problems with the new timing rules and I anticipate it will require a team coming from behind that runs out of time and loses to get the rule changed.

Initially the officiating community was informed the reason for the changes in the timeing rule was to speed up the game for TV.  Games were taking 3 hours to nearly 4 hours to complete.  If games could be sped up, more games could bed aired on TV (especially since all Div. games would have TV cameras for Instant Review) and a game kicking off at 5 PM would not run into Prime Time Programming.

Two weeks ago the word was that it was the coaching community who wanted to speed the game up .  I don't know for certain who wanted the change, but if I were a betting man I'd bet it was the big money behind TV that helped this rule change come into being.

Answer
David,
You said it!  I agree.  But if the NCAA/conferences is making so much more money, do you think they could increase the game officials' fee and give us a little more for travel.  Trust me, we are not getting rich officiating games - sometimes we don't break even. But then again we don't do it for the money, it is done for the love of the game.