Yesterday, my girlfriend was kind enough to bring me the Sunday Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Having had lots of things to do yesterday, including watching old episodes of “The Office”, playing Madden and watching a 2-hour Extreme Makeover: Home Edition, I did not have the time to read said paper. So as I’m sitting here reading yesterday’s paper, I came across an article by Tony Barnhart, the AJC’s primary college football reporter.

The article talks about the rules made by the NCAA last year to make games faster, rules that included a running clock at rather inopportune moments, i.e., when a change of possession occurs. The article quotes several prominent coaches (Steve Spurrier, Mark Richt, Ralph Friedgen, Tennessee offensive coordinator David Cutcliffe) as saying that what the new rules are really doing is hurting the game from a strategic standpoint as well as from the vantage point of the fans.

First of all, I’m not sure who was complaining about the length of college football games. Compared to the NFL, college football games are quick. The truth of the matter is that the game on the field wasn’t and isn’t making the game longer, it’s the commercials and TV timeouts. And that has absolutely nothing to do with the game.

The article says that despite a survey that said 57 percent of Division I-A coaches wanted to go back to the old rules, the new rules weren’t likely to change.

Barnhart quoted Dennis Poppe, the NCAA’s managing director for football as saying, “I think we could see some modification at the end of the half and the end of the game,” Poppe said. “The key is whether or not this change impacts the integrity of the game and the way it’s supposed to be played. If there is a good reason to make another change, we’ll make it.”

What’s disgraceful about this is that the rule change was never meant to benefit or improve the integrity of the game.

So let me get this straight, the coaches think the rules are hurting the game and actually lessening the integrity of the game but the NCAA essentially has no intention of changing them. So if the NCAA isn’t acting on behalf of the “student-athletes” or on behalf of the coaches, who are they trying to protect? The answer: the networks, the conferences and their respective wallets.

Here’s a link to yesterday’s AJC article.

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