Josh Heupel addresses impact of college football clock rule change

Tennessee head coach Josh Heupel opened up on how he thought the new clock rules in college football would affect play. Translation: not too much.

The new rule in place states the clock will no longer stop after teams gain a first down. The clock stopped until the chains were reset. Now that’s not the case as college football took a page out of the NFL’s book.

But Heupel doesn’t think it’s going to change gameplay all  that much.

“The clock rule at the end of the first half, I think everybody is going to be playing in the same way,” Heupel said. “I don’t think it’s going to have a dramatic, different effect on us versus another offense.

“How you manage your time-outs might be a little different at the end of regulation or the end of the half. All in all, we’ll see what the numbers play out to be. But there’s a series of the game that’s probably taken away in general for every team because of some of the clock rules. But we’ll see how that plays out during the course of the year.”

The rule was put into place to speed up the game. Not necessarily the play on the field but the length of games, particularly with the way college football is broadcasted on television.

Sometimes 12 noon kickoffs aren’t done until around 3:30 or later, depending upon the situation. Steve Shaw, the national coordinator of officials, told The Athletic’s Nicole Auerbach in February that the committee was considering a change to clock stoppage rules. Given the increase in passing in college (and in the NFL), the clock stoppages are making games longer.

Shaw shared that, moving forward, the committee is considering likening an incomplete pass to a run out of bounds.

“That (rule change) probably would have the biggest impact of anything we could do because there are so many passes now, and, unfortunately in some of these long games, there are a bunch of incomplete passes,” Shaw said. “That could be a way to keep the game moving …

“And it would still leave the offense in control of not only the tempo but also the clock. If an offense said, hey, I don’t want to lose plays out of this game because they’re going to restart the clock, they can simply get to the line and get there quickly, so when the ball is there you can snap it.”

The rule Shaw referenced was not approved although rules about no consecutive timeouts and no untimed downs for penalties at the end of the first and third quarter were approved.