Clock Watchers
August 28, 2006 03:22 PM | General
August 28, 2006
 |
||
| Rich Rodriguez |
MORGANTOWN, W.Va. – The new ruling the NCAA adopted this year to shorten the length of college football games could have a significant impact on strategy, according to West Virginia coach Rich Rodriguez.
Because games, especially those on television, were running as long as four hours, the NCAA rules committee has decided to speed up the length of games by starting the clock immediately after each possession change instead of when the ball is snapped. The goal is to try and reduce the length of the game by as much as 15 minutes.
Offensive minded coaches like West Virginia’s Rich Rodriguez and Cal’s Jeff Tedford don’t like the rule because it takes away the number of possessions an offense has each game.
“The biggest impact will be at the end of the half and at the end of the game when you’re trying to score or trying to run out the clock,” Rodriguez said. “The other impact is it’s going to cut down on the number of plays in a game. It will probably reduce somewhere between eight to nine plays in each game which maybe takes away one more series or one more drive. Instead of having 11 or 12 opportunities to score you may only have 10.”
Tedford believes end-of-game strategies will be altered significantly.
“Suppose we are in a close game, two points behind, with the clock running out,” he told the BearInsider.com. “We receive a kickoff and run it back to the opponent’s 25-yard line, and there are two seconds left. With the clock starting immediately, there is simply no time to get a field goal kicking unit onto the field to try to win the game.”
Rodriguez says it’s something the coaches will simply have to get adjusted to.
“We knew they were coming to that because of the length of the games but I wish they would have chosen another avenue to shorten the game other than to take away plays,” he said. “But it is what it is and coaches have to deal with it.”
The clock will also start now as soon as the kicker kicks the ball instead of when it is touched by the receiving team, meaning balls deliberately kicked out of bounds could consume the remaining few seconds of a game. Rodriguez doesn’t see that rule change being as significant as the change of possession rule.
“It will change the way coaches manage the end of the game,” he said.
Two other rules changes of note this year:
Briefly:
“The trainer thinks he’s still a couple weeks away,” said the coach. “He’s moving around a little bit now without the boot. He’s making progress but those high ankle sprains can be tough to deal with.”
“One similarity is we’re both coaching at our alma mater in places that we know very well,” Rodriguez said. “We both came from coordinator positions at high profile schools.
“Mark got there really late in his first year and he didn’t have as much time to put in his system as I did my first year. We really struggled our first year and I’m sure Mark will tell you the second year everything is a lot easier,” Rodriguez said. “Everyone understands the system, understands the program, what he wants done and how he wants it done. I can remember my second year was the same way.”
“The mistake we made a couple of years ago when we had high expectations was when we started off OK going 8-1 we weren’t happy after a lot of the games because we didn’t look a certain way or win by a certain amount of points,” Rodriguez said. “I want to avoid that. I don’t want our players to feel any more pressure that they have to perform or look a certain way. Just go out and play as hard as you can and play as well as you can and if you don’t look a certain way or win by a certain amount that’s OK.
“The bottom line is to play as hard and as well as you can and if you win everything is going to be all right.”
“(Our players) have watched the film and they know Marshall has got good players and they’re going to be extremely excited to play us,” he said. “We’re going to have to put on a good performance and play our type of football.”
