Will Committee Seek to Trim More Time Off Games?

Marty Couvillion of the terrific cfbstats.com, who has been conducting a season-long study of the impact of the 40/25 second clock rules, believes the new rules are here to stay, "maybe with slight tweaking."

Marty writes: "If you compare this year to 2005 (before they started tinkering with the rules), they've lost 6.09 plays and 10 minutes per game. I think they (the rules committee) will take that, especially since there has been little public outcry about the rules, at least nothing like 2006. The thing we don't know is the target Time/G that the rules committee wants to get to — is 3:11 good enough or do they want it to be lower?"

One other note: There were 169 plays in the Troy-Louisiana State game, tying the third-highest number of plays in a game this season. LSU rallied from a 28-point deficit in the third quarter to win, 40-31. That is the third-largest rally for a victory since the 2005 season.

Marty's weekly look at the average number of plays and time of a game for the past four seasons, plus the Week 12 numbers:         

             G      Plays/G   Time/G   Pts/G
2005     717    140.71      3:21      52.61
2006     792    127.53      3:07      47.53
2007     792    143.42      3:23      55.37
2008     664    134.62      3:11      52.41
Wk 12     50    134.92      3:12      53.44

The longest games of Week 12:
Buffalo-Akron: 4:06
Troy-Louisiana State: 3:43
Minnesota-Wisconsin: 3:40
Rutgers-South Florida: 3:35
Wake Forest-North Carolina State: 3:35
Tulsa-Houston: 3:30
South Carolina-Florida: 3:29
Notre Dame-Navy: 3:25

The shortest games of Week 12:
Alabama Birmingham-Tulane: 2:40
Washington State-Arizona State: 2:45
New Mexico-Colorado State: 2:49
Louisiana Monroe-Mississippi: 2:50
Texas A&M-Baylor: 2:53
Utah State-Louisiana Tech: 2:54
Ball State-Miami (Ohio): 2:54

Comments

[Mark]

I don't know about the other games, but I can say with authority that the reason the Arizona State-Washington State game was played so briskly was because it was NOT televised anywhere, so no need for TV timeouts or commercial interruptions. This is the issue with all these attempts to monkey with the game -- the real problem is commercial creep, not the gameplay. If they want to trim minutes, start with the advertisers and not the action on the field.