Six Plays, Six Minutes
The NCAA picked the wrong battle because it had to
Have you heard? College football games are too long.
At least that’s what the NCAA, the bloated and oblivious overlord of college athletics, decided in February.
I don’t know why the NCAA came to this conclusion, but I know they didn’t ask the fans what they thought. If anything, the rabid maniacs who love college football feel there’s not enough of it in their lives. They don’t settle onto their stadium seat cushions and basement couches on Saturday afternoons muttering “OK let’s get this thing over with.”
However, they do say that the commercial breaks are too long and too frequent. They say that a lot, and it’s very different than saying the games are too long.
But the NCAA decided the games needed to be shorter, and so it did what it usually does: it formed a silly committee to address an imaginary problem.
Committees are bad
When a bureaucracy like the NCAA forms a committee you should be very worried. Committees have charters and chairpeople and carefully crafted agendas for meetings in Hyatt conference rooms, where data is presented and reviewed and everyone gets a chance to speak and nod and eat a chicken Caesar salad.
Then, just before everyone heads to the airport, the committee finalizes its recommendation.
(A committee’s recommendation is never, ever, ever “things are fine.” According to the committee, if things were fine the committee wouldn’t be necessary; the committee was necessary, therefore things aren’t fine.)
In this case, the committee recommended that college football games be shortened mostly by requiring the clock to run in situations where it used to stop, thereby reducing the number of plays that are run in each game.
The NCAA adopted these rule changes starting this season. And the early results are in: The Athletic reported this week that an average of six plays and six minutes have been removed from each of our college football games.
All of this for SIX MINUTES.
This means that for a 2:30 game, you’ll be free to move on with your day at 5:46 instead of 5:52. What will you do with all that extra free time?
The plays are the thing
You may think removing six plays from a game isn’t a big deal, but I’m going to talk you out of that. This isn’t a harmless tweak.
We crave college football for a variety of reasons that are hard to articulate to people who haven’t been infected by the college football disease. We love the tailgates and tunnel walks, the colors and crowds. But ultimately we show up for the plays.
The plays are what make you scream and scare the dog and jump off your couch and step on cupcakes in your friend’s basement1 and throw your remote and almost hit your grandmother2.
The unexpected punt return for a touchdown is a play; the diving catch on third and nine is a play; the recovered fumble when you’re down seven in the fourth quarter is a play. The plays can be good or they can be bad, but they are what keep us coming back to that moment of stillness before the first snap of the next game, when we feel some hope that today will be special, that today’s plays will be ones that we talk about years from now, recalling exactly where we were and who we were with.
The plays are the thing. OUR thing.
And now each team has around 72 fewer plays per season, thanks to the Committee for Reducing Awesome Plays (CRAP). That’s about half a game worth of touchdowns and fumbles and new memories that will never happen.
Smaller box, smaller pizza, same price.
Baseball did it
The Major League Baseball people worked on a similar project last winter too, but unlike college football, baseball had an actual problem: its timeless pace, the unique feature that had set baseball apart for over a century, had become its weakness. Baseball was no longer just competing against other sports, it was competing against our nation’s shrinking attention span. Why watch a three hour pitchers’ duel when you can access an infinite scroll of cooking demonstrations and skateboard wipeouts right now?
When baseball went about fixing itself, it recognized that you don’t lose weight by chopping off your foot. Pitch clocks and other tweaks were introduced to eliminate some of the dead spaces, but the actual baseball was left alone. There are the same number of pitches, swings, outs and innings there have always been.
And it worked. Baseball games are 27 minutes shorter this year. Attendance is up, too.
That’s how you do it.
The NCAA was designed to fail
You may have noticed that the NCAA is fiddling with college football’s game clock while the structure of the sport is coming apart at the seams. A new round of conference realignment has wrecked rivalries and regions, plopping (for example) USC and Maryland in one conference and Utah and West Virginia in another. Meanwhile, newly conference-free schools like Oregon State and Washington State are forced to beg and sue their way to more secure ground. Beginning next year, the conference landscape will be completely unfamiliar.
Why is the NCAA letting this happen?
The dirty secret of college sports is that when it comes to the big stuff, the NCAA was designed to fail.
We have been conditioned to think of the NCAA as a reliable and important national institution, like a federal agency. But the NCAA wasn’t formed by the government at all — it was formed by the schools it “oversees”, to act as a smokescreen and a scapegoat, to work on the little stuff while the universities pursue their own interests.
The schools granted the NCAA a little sandbox to play in, a sliver of authority to hold tournaments, generate mission statements and make rules about things like player eligibility and game clocks.
What the NCAA is not allowed to get involved in, under any circumstances, is the universities’ money. Don’t touch it. Don’t even look at it.
Think of the NCAA as a more athletic United Nations. It’s a governing body that publicly signals unity and cooperation, but when it comes to important decisions nothing gets done, because no member will ever give up its own autonomy to the other suspicious characters in the room.
For decades the NCAA carried the universities’ water and promoted the “college sports are amateur” fairy tale. When a court blew that up, it was the NCAA that was embarrassed, not the schools. The NCAA then rushed to establish the NIL rules ensuring that (surprise!) third parties — and not the universities — would foot the bill. All by design.
This is why the CRAP didn’t even consider shortening games by eliminating commercial breaks, and why USC and UCLA joined a conference with Rutgers and Maryland without having to ask anyone’s permission.
The NCAA can’t touch the money.
College football fans like to pick on the NCAA for its goofy projects and wrongheaded decisions. It’s fun and easy, I do it too.
But when the NCAA reaches its inevitable demise, universities will replace it with something equally and intentionally ineffective. Maybe a College Football Commissioner, maybe NCAA 2.0, maybe Kirk Herbstreit. But until the universities decide to hand over their autonomy to a bunch of people they don’t trust, nothing will change. College football will continue to shed its skin and slither toward the largest pile of money.
The business of modern college football is essentially an uneasy coexistence between the fans and universities. The fans get to watch their plays on Saturday; the schools get the money.
On behalf of college football fandom, I say this to the universities:
It’s ultimately our money that keeps the college football engine running. We make donations, buy tickets and help fund the NIL collectives while you sell our eyeballs to advertisers.
You took away six of our plays for six minutes of nothing. What’s next, seat cushions? Cut it out. Don’t dump Gatorade on our heads and tell us it’s raining. Ask our opinion once in a while.
We’ll continue to love this crazy game because we can’t help ourselves. Go ahead and make your money. Just leave our game alone.
Let me know what you think in the comments or at fauxpelini@gmail.com. Or on Twitter, I still have that.
Based on a true story.
Also based on a true story.
Awesome stuff as always! Similar to cupcakes & remotes, my mom got banned from watching Husker games at her parents house because of iced tea on the ceiling...
Unfortunately, as a Husker fan, I do usually sit down and mutter “OK let’s get this thing over with” on Saturdays.
But also, thanks for bringing this to my attention because I didn’t realize the game clock rules made that big of an impact - six plays is an entire drive! A potentially game-winning drive that comes down to the wire!