HOW SEC WILL SHORTEN FOOTBALL GAMES IN FALL

Keeping halftime on pace, other measures are being considered.

ATHENS — If you’ve attended college football games lately and said to yourself “this game seems too long,” you’re not alone. The NCAA and SEC think so too.

And if you’ve sat through what’s supposed to be a 20-minute halftime and thought to yourself, “that went a bit longer than 20 minutes,” you’re also not alone. The NCAA and SEC have noticed that too.

The SEC, as part of a national emphasis, will implement a few measures — minor enough that many may not notice — to shave a few minutes off the average time of a college game.

The average length of an SEC game last year was 3 hours, 26 minutes. The national average was 3:24. The conference would like its number to go down.

“We’ve asked before, what is the optimal time? And nobody’s answered that question yet,” SEC coordinator of officials Steve Shaw said during a presentation to the media at the recent SEC meetings. “If you ask the NFL, they have answers for that. But their game looks so much alike game-

to-game, they’re always in a tight window. Ours are not.”

Indeed, while the NFL and college both use four 15-minute quarters, NFL games are shorter and intentionally so. They need those 1 p.m. ET games to finish in time for fans to tune in for the start of the later games, which start around 4:15 p.m. The college schedule on Saturdays is less regimented. Each conference has its own TV contract, and ESPN, which has the most TV involvement, is able to bounce games around its various channels.

The NCAA is concerned about its game length, but not enough that it’s changing the two things that differentiate it from the NFL: stopping the clock on first downs and a 20-minute halftime, versus a 12-minute NFL halftime.

But there will be an increased emphasis to both those facets.

Regarding halftime, Shaw said there’s an acknowledgment that there has been too much lollygagging. Officials have gotten away from starting the 20-minute halftime clock immediately, either because they’re waiting on the coaches’ walk-off interviews, or the game manager is concerned that two bands will be performing. Halftimes have often been stretching to 23 or 24 minutes.

Starting this season, after the last play of the half, the referee will make sure there are no flags or no replay reviews coming. “And then we’re going to crank the 20-minute (clock),” Shaw said.

When the 20 minutes are up, kickoff will quickly follow.

“I really believe if our officials work well with our TV partners and we do well with the halftime component, we’ll whittle that down,” Shaw said.

Then there’s first downs and how quickly the clock winds afterwards. Shaw said there will be a re-emphasis on re-starting the clock as soon as the center judge puts the ball down to be snapped. Research showed time had been delayed there as well.

Shaw also said referees have been told to be “actively consistent” in restarting the game clock after the substitution process.

“We’re going to keep the game moving,” Shaw said.

How much time will be saved overall with these measures? Shaw said the thinking is it will cut down five or six minutes.

So what about the length of commercial breaks, which fans complain about? That’s out of the control of the officials.

The referee does have the discretion to keep the game going rather than going to a TV timeout in some cases where the flow of the game is important.

“If there’s a momentum play, the referee can look at the (on-field TV producer, usually in a red hat) and say, no,” Shaw said. “Let’s say you have a punt. The referee gets ready for play, gets his count and I would always sneak a peak at the red hat and he would say, ‘I want a timeout.’ But we would get a big punt return and I’ll say to him, ‘Nope we’re going (on), we’re staying.’

“But once it goes to TV, our TV liaison has total control.”