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SOUTHEASTERN CONFERENCE MEDIA DAYSJuly 26, 2007Rogers ReddingBIRMINGHAM, ALABAMA CHARLES BLOOM: Welcome to day two of SEC Football Media Days. We'll get started with Rogers Redding. ROGERS REDDING: Good morning, everyone. Good to be back with you again this year. I'm looking forward to the season. We have our officials clinic coming up this weekend. Our guys are coming into town, ready to get started. What I'm going to do this morning is take you through the rule changes for 2007. I would also point out to you there is a one-page summary of the rule changes on the table outside. Let me talk about the transition from last year to this year. Last year when I stood up and talked with you, the big headlines around the rule changes were the clock rules. Though the two clock rules put in place last year, starting the clock when the ball was kicked on a kickoff and starting the clock when the referee signaled the ball ready for play following a change of possession, those two rules probably had the shortest half-life of any two rules in the history of the NCAA. There was so much dissatisfaction among coaches and fans, the rules committee was under some pressure to shorten the game. What they did was shorten the game by shortening playing time, which had the effect of taking plays out of the game. One of the intended consequences to shorten the game took place, but one of the unintended consequences of taking plays out of the game was a negative effect in the view of most folks. The rules committee this year backed away from those two rules and simply restored the previous rules that had been in place for all the time all of us had known about football. The first slide, on the kickoff, as was the case in 2005 and for years and years and years previous to that, on the kickoff the clock will start. Once the ball is kicked the clock will start when the ball is legally touched in the field of play. That means if the ball has gone 10 yards, the kicking team touches it, clock starts. If the ball is first touched by the receiving team in the field of play, clock starts. If the ball is touched in the end zone by a receiving team player, the clock won't start until the ball either by itself or in the hands of the player comes out of the end zone. That's the rule that everybody knew, we all grew up with. That's one of the changes this year, to go back to the '05 rule on starting the clock. As it turns out, there's probably four or five seconds when the ball is in the air. Depends on several things. Typically about five seconds. The committee felt like this was time that needed to be put back in the game. There will be another rule about the kickoff. The kickoff is going to be an important aspect this year. But this clock rule is restored to its previous form. The next clock rule, the one that really got all the chatter last year, was starting the clock on the change of possession. Last year on the change of possession, if you caught a punt, let's say, and the clock is dead, then the teams switch, when the referee declared the ball ready for play, that's when the clock started. That was a very unusual set of circumstances. It was hard for everybody to get used to. It looked funny, felt funny. In addition to that, it ate up a lot of clock time. Again, this year the rule will go back to what it was before. That is, if you have a change of possession, in the team that was on defense or the team that received the football, when they start on offense, then the clock will not start until the ball is snapped. Again, that's the rule that we all knew for all that long length of time. The clock rules, as I said, have all the headlines. There's more clock rules I want to talk about. But really the rule that is going to impact how the game is played, in my view, is to kick the ball off, the kickoff will be from the 30 yard line. It's been at the 35 yard line for a number of years. Many of us can remember when the ball was kicked off from the 40 yard line. When it was kicked off from the 40 yard line, eventually kickers adjusted, were booming the ball through the end zone, we got a touchback. They backed it up to the 35 yard line. For a couple years, the kickoff return was back in the game. But, again, the kickers adjusted and were bombing the ball through the end zone. Last year, if you recall, they made a little change that got lost in all the hubbub about the clock, but they made a change that said that the ball could not be more than one inch off the ground, lowered the tee basically, that had no impact at all. The committee this year has moved it back to the 30 yard line. We were seeing in the spring games and spring scrimmages that kickers were typically getting the ball to the 12 and 8 yard line, maybe deeper than that. Very seldom, if at all, getting it in the end zone. This puts the kickoff return back in the football game. If there's anything more boring than a touchback, I'm not sure what it is. The kickoff return will be back in the game. There's a lot of fan interest in this, a lot of excitement about a kickoff return, all that. And also it helps speed up the game because you're not wasting time switching teams for the touchback, the clock is running when the ball is touched, while the ball carrier is running with the football. The kickoff from the 30 yard line I think is going to be an important rule change. Back to the clock for a moment. As I said, last year, the rules committee was under some pressure to shorten the elapsed time of the game. So what the committee did this year was to take the approach to say, Okay, we're going to put the playing time back in, and therefore put the plays back in. Let's try to find some time when the ball is dead when we can save some time, so that rather than controlling the elapsed time by changing the playing time, control the elapsed time by manipulating some dead-ball situations. So, for example, if we have a televised football game, if a game is on live television, a team calls one of their three timeouts of the half, if that is a timeout that is not accompanied by a TV timeout, then it will be for one minute. That is to say, 30 seconds, plus about five seconds to kind of get everybody ready again, then the referee chops the 25-second clock. That's a total of a minute. For all of time it has been a minute and a half, so they shaved 30 seconds off of the team timeout time. The committee, I should also remind you the football rules committee is all coaches, so officials really have no say in how the rules are made. Our responsibility is to administer and enforce the rules. But the committee was saying, When we call a timeout, we're really not calling a timeout to rest our players or talk strategy, we're calling a timeout to get the clock stopped. So they felt like they could save some time in terms of using up some dead time to restore, get back to not having the games themselves run so long. So, again, 30 seconds shaved off of a charge team timeout. If the team timeout is accompanied by a television timeout, then this doesn't have any effect because the television timeout is going to be for whatever length of time the contract with the TV network says: two minutes, two and a half minutes, whatever it happens to be. But many times, late in the game, TV timeouts have been exhausted. A team is trying to get the clock stopped. They'll stop the clock by using one of their three timeouts for that half. So that timeout will be a total length of one minute, 35 seconds to have the timeout, plus the 25 seconds of the 25-second clock. Okay? The next one is the ready-for-play interval. The play clock we've always referred to it as the 25-second clock, because that's what it's been. Well, this year the 25-second clock will now also be sometimes a 15-second clock. That is to say, coming out of a TV timeout the ready-for-play clock will be 15 seconds. The coaches on the committee were saying, Look, we can get our guys out there. We don't need those 25 seconds to get the ball in play. Coming out of a TV timeout the play clock will be 15 seconds. There is an exception. Football rules book is full of exceptions. The exception is if you're going to kickoff following that TV timeout, the play clock will still be 25 seconds. So, for example, if there's a punt and the team receiving the punt, the ball is dead, TV takes its timeout, coming out of that TV timeout, the play clock will be 15 seconds. The stadium clocks, we're working with the facilities people, game management people, to get the stadium clocks where they can toggle between 25 and 15. Obviously sometimes it's going to be 25, sometimes it's going to be 15. If the TV timeout is taken after the extra point attempt where there's going to be a kickoff next, then it will be 25 seconds. The idea there was, let's don't get the kickers confused having sometimes 25 and sometimes 15. The consistency there was for the benefit of the kickoff team to always have the 25 seconds. How much time this is really going to save is anybody's guess. This is kind of a grand experiment with these various clock rules that are adjusting time during the dead time of the football game. But this is an experiment. This is one that I think has some potential for saving a little bit of time. This is a change having to do with fouls that are committed by the kicking team on punts and kickoffs. Last year -- well, prior to last year, if there was a foul against the kicking team, let's say some team punted and committed some kind of foul. They were illegally in motion or even committed a major foul like clipping or holding during the kick. The receiving team only had the option of either taking the result of the play, declining the penalty, or going back and having them penalized from the previous spot and rekick. The rekick takes time. It also doesn't really offer the receiving team that much of an option. Last year there was a modest rule change that said if there were what are sometimes referred to as procedural fouls, that is to say let's say that the kicking team on a punt only had six men on the line of scrimmage. They have to have seven. If they had an illegal shift, men moving. If they were illegally in motion, some other kind of five-yard penalty type procedural foul, then the receiving team had the option of tacking that penalty on rather than going back and rekicking. Well, this year that rule has been expanded so now that any foul by the kicking team on a punt or a kickoff, with the exception of kick catch interference. But any other foul, whether it's a foul in conjunction with a snap or one later on in the play during the kick, the receiving team will have the option of having that penalty tacked onto where they would have had the football anyway. Let's say, as an example, the kicking team on a punt punts the ball, and somewhere during the kick they commit a holding foul, let's say takedown, and the receiving team gets the ball. Let's say they return it to the 30 yard line. They'll have the option of having that 10-yard penalty tacked on so they would put the play on the 40 yard line. They always have the option of having them go back and rekick. That's always an option. But the additional option they have this year, it speeds the game up, it doesn't take time, you don't have the time you need to set up a kick again, and also it gives the receiving team, the team that was on defense, much more of an option in terms of what they want to do. So that's a change that I think has some potential importance in the way the game is played as well. Action by the defense on kick plays. This is a safety issue. For a long time, the language that's in yellow is new in that rule. For a long time, it has been the case that the defensive team, in trying to block a kick, were not allowed to be picked up by a teammate. In other words, picked up in the air to get them elevated where they could try to block the kick. Well, this year the coaches put in another -- an expansion of this rule that says that, as you can see from the language, it's illegal now for the defensive player to be not only picked up by elevated, propelled or pushed. What we're seeing is a linebacker getting behind a defensive tackle and shoving him into the offense in an attempt to get through to block the kick. The coaches felt like -- the linebacker is typically going to come in and pile up on top of that. The coaches felt like this was a safety issue in terms of the guy that's getting -- the offensive tackle, let's say. So this is an expansion of that rule. It will be a personal foul just like it was in the case of being picked up by a teammate. Let's see. Is there one more? Okay, that's it. Again, just to reiterate sort of the philosophy that the committee took was to adjust the clock rules to go back to where they were in 2005. But in conjunction with that, put in some of these other clock rules during the dead-ball times to try to help contain the amount of elapsed time in the football game. Thank you very much. End of FastScripts |
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