What To Do With All The Free Time?
Wednesday, November 15, 2006 at 11:43AM Updated 3-2-5-e time lost data
Five points a game and 14 minutes. Thank you, NCAA and coaches.
Anyone else miss the four hour games? USC/Oregon had a 17-minute marathon replay review session and still checked in under 3.5 hours.
Look, I literally do nothing but watch football from 11 a.m. until past midnight each saturday. The length of any given game does nothing to my routine. Nothing.
College football isn't like the NFL where the fans can set their clocks to a game ending at say, 6:30 on the button and going onto whatever else they're doing in their lives. College football's much more like baseball, where games end when they end, the joy is in the journey, and this new rule has clearly pushed us away from that and towards the nannyish NFL (we'll have you and your kids tucked into bed by 9:30 p.m.-promise).
I did bitch after the Rose Bowl about the game being too long, but that was because literally every two minutes the game was being stopped to cater to another barrage of commercials. It's not fun when you're in the stands during one of the better games around and can't distract yourself with the commercials and have to sit on pins and needles for the next play worrying about what Vince Young or Reggie Bush was going to do next. Let the guys play!
There's a nice rhythm to the college game and it's lost with unplanned interruptions such as lengthy replay reviews or untimely commercial breaks that do not coincide with changes of possession or scores. That, and not the game itself, is what makes these games run long. I don't mind the commercialization of the sport, by all means run ads and as many as possible, but there's an invisible threshold where too much is too much, and we have crossed it.
What's equally disconcerting is this annoying time-management game that now goes on in college football. Teams can now literally sit on the ball in the second half, particularly during a last possession. It's made the game more conservative and it's made its coaches and fans do a lot more math instead of simply watching the game evolve.
We missed a likely Arizona State comeback against USC earlier this year because their coach guessed wrong on whether to punt or make a fourth down effort with around two minutes left in the game. The coach punted, and USC found a way to kill the clock without having to punt. It was a tremendous gaffe, but wasn't readily apparent until USC's second or third down that they would escape unharmed. Last year there would have been a punt, one more pass and a hail mary for the Sun Devils to make one last-ditch effort. Not so this year.
We now have coaches playing onside kick games to ice the clock.
What next?
The rule's bad and I think it will be changed in the offseason, but the larger issue is the initial approval. Many people were either asleep at the wheel or did not have the foresight and game's interest in mind enough to figure out things would work out badly. To me that's a sign of a combination of incompetence, persistent meddling and short-sightedness at the management level of the game.
Some heads probably need to roll and better stewards for the game hired in their place. Sadly, I doubt the NCAA's figured that out.
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Reader Comments (5)
Absolutely agree with all that you said. Being a quasi baseball analyst for sometime, I can tell you that for whatever reason, people that love the game and truly care about it are hardly ever at the wheel when it comes to what is best for a particular sport. I think college football is the last bastion of what sport is supposed to be about, and yet with rules like this, you can see it slowly getting away from it. I hope you are right in the rule reversal, but you are definitely right about the idea that the NCAA hasn't figured it out.
I don't know if you've read it, but a great baseball book that lends a bit of knowledge to this disucssion is "Lords of the Realm." It's basically a history of the owners & players association, but you come away with the thought, "these guys are the ones in charge?" It's amazing.
I'll take note of the book. I'm so backlogged in my reading with the season going on, however :o).
I'm not naive about leadership in the NCAA, government, etc. but I'm also not really a cynic however. Fools get into jobs that affect us sometimes, all I ask is for them to take some care once in a while. Even the best of leaders make a boatload of mistakes. I think that as misguided as the NCAA is, it doesn't take much for them to stop being "stuck on stupid" and see that some of the contemporary issues are amenable.
HEH.
Unfortunately, I think that it was all too deliberately done, and with probably some idea of what it would do to the game itself...those in charge simply didn't care. Especially given the way the rule was tucked away at the bottom of a bunch of other rule changes/tweaks. The only reason that the rule was changed was due to television wanting to shoehorn more ads in and have games fit more neatly into given timeslots, rather than bumping up into each other. If the NCAA was REALLY concerned about shortening the length of games, they would sell less ad time, cause all it takes to realize why games run long is to go to one that is televised vs. one that isn't to realize why the things take forever. And the fact that hardly ANY of the various pundits and talking heads have addressed the TV issue head on makes me think that they are under strict orders from higher up to come up with alternate theories as to why the rule change came about, or just simply ignore the elephant in the room.
Let's face it: the suits at ESPN, ABC, CBS, FSN, etc, who go by focus groups, marketing studies, and demographic trends are the ones who pushed this rule through -- NOT people who truly have the game's best interests in mind.