I just stumbled across an amusing take on one of the new NCAA football rules to be instituted this year. Sunday Morning Quarterback points out
SMQ should be clear that the pageantry and emotion of college football is wonderful (and so, too, especially, is beer), and is its primary attraction over the blatantly corporate NFL. This is 3-2-5-e’s greatest flaw: the number of plays will be reduced by about a dozen or so, very likely more, which will put numbers around an NFL-esque 145 or so plays per game. This has little to do with excessive outside marketing and much to do with the actual on-field product; the professional games in SMQ’s view are notoriously bloated by very long play clocks (up to two-thirds of a game can tick, tick, tick away while people gesture wildly at the line of scrimmage) and non-stoppages for first downs, elements that hurt games by cutting the number of snaps to a bare bones, flow-crushing minimum. The length – as in the number of snaps college teams get off in a game – is one of the relative strengths, along with much wider variations in strategy and the aforementioned pageantry, of the “amateur” contests.
I love Coach Richt, but so far he has not figured out how to manage a game clock, so I doubt the rule change will adversely affect UGA any more than poor clock management has in the past.
