NEW ORLEANS — Anyone looking for major changes in college football rules for the 2023 season will be disappointed. For John McDaid, that’s a good thing.
But the Sun Belt Conference’s Coordinator of Football Officials did provide an update on the few rule adjustments in place for the upcoming season during Day 2 of Sun Belt Football Media Days on Wednesday at the Sheraton New Orleans Hotel.
One change in particular will be readily apparent to college fans—and could result in game times being slightly shorter than last year’s average of three hours and 21 minutes across all of FBS football. Beginning this season, the clock will not stop when a team picks up a first down inbounds except in the final two minutes of each half.
“When I listen to the schools, the chancellors and presidents, the athletic directors, when I listen to the teams and our fans and our coaches, 3:21 a game’s not bad,” said McDaid, whose data shows that FBS games have averaged between 3:16 and 3:24 over each of the past five years. “What they’re concerned about, and what we’re concerned about, is the average number of plays in those games. Three hour and 45-minute games are what we don’t want.”
FBS games averaged 178.3 plays last year, the lowest in five years, but McDaid said that the difference over those years has been only four plays. He expects the revised clock rules, each in place to increase player safety, will shorten games by only four or five plays per game.
The other new regulations that could affect game times this year are the prohibition of teams calling back-to-back timeouts in the same dead-ball situation. - “You’re not going to ice the kicker with two timeouts anymore,” he said — and a change that will eliminate untimed downs due to penalties at the end of the first and third quarters. Untimed downs in penalty situations at the end of each half will continue.
McDaid was almost relieved when the topic of targeting came up. A controversial rule change a few years ago, McDaid said that targeting calls were again reduced by a significant amount last season and were only a small part of the average 14.1 penalties called in FBS games.
“We had a 35 percent reduction in targeting per game across the FBS from 2020 to 2021, and a 25 percent reduction from 2021 to 2022,” he said. “Overall, there was a 68 percent reduction in targeting per game in just a two-year span.” “You ask me what’s the explanation for that, to me it’s clearly the behavior of the athletes has changed. They understand what we don’t want in the game, and they’re doing the things to get the head and neck out of collisions in the game.”
Learn more on the rule changes and more from McDaid in the video below:
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