College football could look a whole lot different if one rule change floated by college football commissioners gains traction.
Per Sports Illustrated’s Ross Dellenger, one of the ways commissioners are exploring shortening games is by having the game clock continue running after incomplete passes.
A September 2022 article from Seth Emerson in The Athletic explains why the sport’s decision-makers are considering a rule change.
“There is one main, overriding reason why game times have gone up so much lately: passing,” Emerson wrote.
Per data from The Athletic, games in 2013 averaged three hours and 17 minutes, but in 2022 the length skyrocketed to three hours and 32 minutes.
Ask college football fans, and they’d say the excessive number of timeouts is much more of a drag on game lengths than on passing plays.
That might make a future with more in-game advertisements a reality, an idea ESPN’s senior vice president for programming, Nick Dawson, suggested to Emerson.
There are other, more sensible options under consideration, such as eliminating teams from calling consecutive timeouts and having the clock continue to run after an offense picks up a first down.
Another option is to get rid of untimed downs at the end of the first and third quarters, which occur when there’s a defensive penalty on a down that ends with no time left on the clock. The untimed down would instead be the first play of the second or fourth quarter.
Those situations are fairly uncommon and don’t impact the length of most games.
Every team throws incomplete passes, and having the clock continue to run on those plays would drastically alter the sport.
Big-time comebacks could become a thing of the past, which would make the game a lot less exciting.
In a year or two, don’t be surprised if you start to get a craving for a Whopper after an Arch Manning pass sails out the back of the end zone and the clock continues to run.
