The head coach of the Huskers and the director of athletics have shared their opinions on these now-imminent ideas.
Matt Rhule thinks it’s OK that college rules are beginning to resemble NFL regulations.
The NCAA Football Rules Committee proposed new rules on Friday that would enable FBS teams to utilize technology to communicate with one player on the field and institute a two-minute warning at the conclusion of each half.
In order to indicate to officials who is receiving the signal, the player would have a green dot on his helmet. With fifteen seconds remaining on the play clock, or when the ball is snapped if that happens first, that player’s communication would end.
Trev Alberts, the athletics director at Nebraska, and Rhule have already exchanged thoughts on similar subjects. In particular, the head coach of the Huskers has stressed the importance of increasing on-field communication in various media contexts.
“We should have the same rules as the NFL, we should have the two-minute warning. How are we playing college football and pro football and we have different hashes – it makes no sense to me,” Rhule said during an appearance on The Pat McAfee Show in December. “I don’t understand no technology. You go to a high school game they have Hudl on the sidelines, they have iPads. We’re holding up signs and boards. And I think they’re working on all this stuff. College football could be really healthy if we got the same rules as the NFL, we implemented technology, and I think as we go to a bigger playoff hopefully it’s going to be really good for football.”
The Playing changes Oversight Panel must still accept the Friday recommendations in April, but as of right now, it appears that the changes will be in effect by the 2024 season. Prior to this proposal, a test run including six playoff bowl games enabled helmet communication for twelve teams.
Regarding the two-minute warning, some people can cringe at first because they believe it to be an additional TV timeout. But ideally, it would take the place of one of the commercial breaks that people concerned in making sure the commercial quota is met have been piling up early in games.
On Albert’s side
Alberts was asked by a fan on his Huskers Radio Network a few months ago if there had been pushback to to the TV timeouts slowing the flow of the game.
“There is already pushback … and it’s a great observation, and quite frankly it’s an observation that’s not been lost on all of us, including our commissioner,” Alberts said of Big Ten commissioner Tony Petitti. “You really get a sense the flow of the game is being disrupted.”
Alberts stated at the time that several of the changes to the rules from the previous season, such as the clock not stopping after first downs (except from the last two minutes of each half), were really made in an attempt to remove a few plays for player safety rather than to shorten the game’s running time for television. Though he stated that it didn’t provide fresh inventory for more TV ads, he estimates that it eliminated five to six plays every game.
There’s no denying that the Huskers’ games last season had occasionally awkward game flow. Even in the first five minutes of several Nebraska games, there were multiple pauses followed by more stops. Additionally, stacked advertisements appeared whenever a team had a The networks would fall behind their scheduled number of breaks and try to make it up with commercial stops that were more or less back to back: one after a score, another after a kickoff.
“And it’s just dead,” Alberts said. “And that’s the flow of the game we’ve got to fix.”
Alberts brought up then the 2-minute warning possibly being of use regarding the problem. That actually helps flow of game, he pointed out, because it’s known there will be automatic TV advertising at that time.
“Because they don’t have to bank stuff at the beginning worried that they won’t get it made up. These are very valid points. These are the types of stuff are game needs to modernize and think about. Because the fans aren’t wrong.”