Lincoln Riley reveals how much he noticed new clock rules during first game

College football is operating with new clock rules in 2023, with the goal to cut down on the overall number of plays in the game to enhance player safety.

Through the first week of the college football season, the rule appears to be having the desired effect. There were about five fewer plays per game run in Week 0 games than the average game last year, while the length of games was shortened by about three minutes.

USC coach Lincoln Riley said he could feel the change with the new clock rules.

“The review at the end was longer than the first quarter, I’ll go ahead and say it,” Riley said with a laugh. “Yeah, you felt it a little bit. I mean I didn’t feel like it was drastic. I could feel throughout the game that there was probably going to be one to maybe two possessions less offensively. Then obviously the kick return kind of flipped that around a little bit.”

Even with some explosive plays on special teams that shortened the field or flipped possession altogether, USC still managed to run 69 plays offensively. The program averaged 64.9 plays per game a year ago.

So the changes aren’t too drastic.

More importantly, Riley and his squad were prepared for it, in part because of an offseason addition to the staff ranks.

“Yeah, you could definitely feel it a little bit. And I expected it,” Riley said. “It’s been good having coach (Kliff) Kingsbury in there with us, because they’ve been used to playing with the running clock on first downs for a long time. So we’ve talked a lot about that and what it’ll feel like. I felt like our guys and our staff were prepared for it.”

The NCAA will continue to monitor the impacts on games throughout the season — Week 0 is a relatively small sample size for now — and look to see what adjustments may be made.

But for now the goal is to proceed forward with new clock rules, which are designed to increase player safety.

“This rule change is a small step intended to reduce the overall game time and will give us some time to review the impact of the change,” said Kirby Smart, Georgia’s coach and the co-chair of the NCAA Football Rules Committee for Division I and Division II football.