TV has a tremendous influence on every sport. That is just the nature of media rights deals that reach the hundreds of millions of dollars. College football is making rule changes in 2023 to accommodate complaints of long games and RJ Choppy isn’t sure that is a good thing.
In college football, the clock would stop after a first down for the referees to reset the chains. That won’t be the case in 2023, as the NCAA has eliminated that rule in order to shorten the run time of games on TV.
Choppy cited a tweet from FOX’s Geoff Schwartz about what this does to the college game.
The running clock on first down mirrors the NFL’s rule. Choppy says adopting it for college football is short-sighted.
“If you try to mimic the NFL, you will now be compared to the NFL and nobody is going to want to watch minor league football,” he said on Tuesday’s edition of Shan & RJ.
This isn’t the first time the NCAA and broadcast networks have altered the rules of the game in order to create more intrigue to get people to tune in.
Choppy says College Football Playoff expansion is another example of making changes to create a more enticing TV product that hurts the sport’s stature in the long run.
“If you’re going to have a tournament like the NFL, you’re going to be compared to the NFL and nobody can be compared to the NFL. And that is going to be like minor league football.”
With the new rule, the clock will be running more frequently, but that doesn’t mean the games are going to get shorter. In fact, Choppy cited a study of Week 0 that showed there were 7% fewer snaps under the new rule, but games only got 1% shorter.
He said the explanation is pretty simple. The NCAA has given so much power to TV that there is nothing stopping the networks from replacing game time with more commercial inventory.
“I mean they can just do it every possession change, they can do it right after and before punts, they can do whatever they want to,” he said. “You know, sometimes in the NFL you have a punt and there won’t be a time out and they won’t go to commercial every once in a while. College football doesn’t work like that. So you are getting so many more commercials and networks are like, ‘Okay, you want to take 30 minutes away from our game? We’re just going to add commercial timeouts for this and we’re going to do more commercials and more minutes of commercials.’”
He added that no one can be happy that there is a rule in place now that limits the number of plays fans will get to see from superstars like USC’s Caleb Williams and North Carolina’s Drake May each week.
