New college football rules: fewer clock stoppages, quicker replay reviews
Posted July 25, 2023 6:00 p.m. EDT
Charlotte, N.C. — No one likes sitting through lengthy video reviews during college football games — and that goes for the ACC's supervisor of football officials.
Alberto Riveron, a former NFL official and administrator, took his new job with the ACC in November. Now he wants officials calling ACC football games to speed up their replay reviews and enter with the assumption that the call on the field is correct.
"Replay is here to catch the egregious error," Riveron said Tuesday at the annual ACC Kickoff event in Charlotte. "It's not here to fix every single play. ... Replay should not be a deterrent for the flow of the game."
He compared the long, interminable reviews that have come to populate the games to watching paint dry. Riveron suggested that if an official hasn't seen enough to overturn the call after three replays, the game should move on. There is no time limit or replay limit in the rules.
"It’s got to kick you in order to overturn it," Riveron said.
Fans may see fewer replays as the result of an NCAA rule change that allows replay officials to overturn an obvious error without sending the on-field referee to a video monitor. A pass that bounces before a receiver catches it, for example, Riveron said could be handled by the replay official who would tell the on-field official that the pass was incomplete, the correct down, distance and yard line as well as the time on the clock.
The NCAA instituted other rules designed to quick the pace of football games. The average Football Bowl Subdivision game was three hours, 24 minutes in 2022.
The biggest and most noticeable change is that the clock will no longer stop after a first down, except in the final two minutes of a game. The move could shave several minutes off game time and reduce the number of plays by seven to nine per game, Riveron said.
That adds up to 100 over the course of a season and comes as the College Football Playoff is expanding. Less plays means fewer exposures for injury. Player safety is driving the change more than game length, Riveron said.
But not everyone is happy with the change.
"If you're asking me, did I feel like it's too long and there was too many plays, no, I did not," Louisville coach Jeff Brohm said.
The change adds a wrinkle to the college game, which stopped the clock on first downs in contrast to the NFL game. It was a benefit to trailing teams attempting to come back and those on offense attempting to save time.
"It could be a very pivotal rule change in how you use the clock," Georgia Tech coach Brent Key said. "Clock management is so important, and now that line of demarcation really at two minutes of when the clock stops and doesn't stop and how to utilize that, you've got to work it in practice."
Key said he'd studied the rule changes during his vacations this summer, snapping photos of rules to send to his assistant coaches. Key said his staff had an hour-long conversation about the changes earlier this week.
"We have to understand now, all right, when the clock continues to run or if it doesn't, now it pauses on first downs. All those different scenarios," he said. "When those quarterbacks go out there and they're leading the team when you are in two-minute drive or on defense and you're defending now in those situations, not only do the coaches know, but the players also have to be able to know and have repped it."
The NCAA is also eliminating back-to-back timeouts by the same team, a move that means teams won't be able to "ice" the kicker more than once.
No back-to-back timeouts means that teams won't be able to "ice the kicker" more than once. Further, penalties at the end of the first and third quarter will carry over and be enforced on the first play of the next quarter.
