It still hasn't really sunk in yet. Amidst all the coaching changes and the rush to update the depth chart based on those lying recruiting rankings, it's important to slow down, savor this moment and reflect on it.

Earliest spring start date in the state, baby. Hell, earlier than LSU, earlier than Georgia, earlier than Florida, Tennessee, Arkansas. The calendar don't lie. And this year, it's looking at spring practice dates, and it's saying, "Commitment is a War Eagle."

Five years ago, I didn't care about spring practice. I still thought about football as a fall-winter thing. I didn't understand the stakes of getting our young men on the field and working to improve under the best damn coaching staff in the land while your unreformed thugs are still woofing down Valentine's candy en route to a DUI. You think you've raised the stakes? I don't see your team strapping 'em on in February.

That's right: February 28. Take your 90,000 and suck on that.

I can hear the haters now, talkin' trash to cover their inferiority complex. Oh, spring practice doesn't matter. It's just practice, man, we're talkin' about practice. I didn't hear y'all saying that last year. But now that the tables have turned, "Oh, it's just practice." You know what practice makes, right? Yeah: perfect. As in 13-0 SEC champions in 2004 perfect. We had a new offensive coordinator then and we have a new offensive coordinator now. Coincidence? We were underrated then just like we're underrated now. And our hard working future stars are hitting the field earlier and harder than you lazy, palm-greasing punks.

Oh, the Tide will roll, all right...they'll roll into the stadium off a forklift after two extra weeks of swag, bon bons and statutory rape.

The polls don't matter. Your lying crook coach's ridiculous salary don't matter. The recruiting rankings sure as hell don't matter. How many people your cow college pays off to put in the stands for the cameras don't matter. What matters is what happens between the lines. On the practice field. In February. That's where champions are made, son.

And we're making 'em two weeks ahead of y'all. Damn, it's great to be the best.

WDE!

I've said all I want to say about the proposed rule changes, and my opposition to them on two grounds: the new clock rules are an unnecessary concession to advertising, which is the real cause of the non-problem of long games, and they will reduce the total number of plays.

For reasons I've already articulated, the second point is not in dispute in my mind despite much disagreement in the comments here and elsewhere. One of the rules, mandating the game clock start when the ball is set after out-of-bounds plays (it has previously always been stopped) is guaranteed to cut the total number of plays by some amount. There seems to be agreement and some tepid hate toward that part of the proposal. The argument is over the other big change, from a 25-second play clock that begins when the ball is marked for play to a 40-second play clock that begins running immediately, a direct copy of NFL rules. If officials currently take 15 seconds to spot the ball before beginning the 25-second clock, in other words, the change is a wash in terms of the total number of snaps.

I don't think it is a wash, especially when it comes to running the clock out in the final two minutes. But at Mssr. Swindle's behest, I decided to take a closer look at exactly how long it's been taking officials to spot the ball and signal the play clock between plays. The best available video for this is a non-broadcast clip of the 2006 LSU-Florida game in Gainesville, narrated by the LSU radio crew, which never cuts away for fan shots, close-ups, promos, replays, graphics or any other distractions; the umpire and referee are clearly visible at all times spotting the ball and signaling the play clock to begin counting down.

This game was during the 3-2-5e season, but that rule affected the clock only on changes of possession, which are not part of what we're looking for. I charted scrimmage plays in the first half, counting the time between the end of each play and the ready-for-play signal on the next play, and also the seconds elapsed between the end of each play and the snap of the followin play (including the time elapsed to spot the ball). It is not representative and cannot be extrapolated to define a whole that includes hundreds of games. It's just to get an idea.

Won't you count with me?

Obsessive conclusions below the jump...

Continue reading this post »

But not by much.

The NCAA Rules Committee enacted a series of clock changes last week:

The immediate backlash on this site and around the `sphere was unequivocal and severe: more seconds on the play clock equals fewer plays and less scoring. Quit stealing our football! After a weekend and a few dissenting commenters, though, the loyal opposition is beginning to melt, quickly: Mssr. Swindle initially trashed the change at EDSBS, but today delivered not only a hedge based on an NCAA spokesman's insistence that the new rules will result in more plays, but later an outright retraction. Brian Cook, reading said NCAA response, also posited that purist anger is misplaced: There are several dubious assumptions there, namely that college officials took more than 15 seconds on average to spot the ball and start the play clock after each play. For now, we'll focus on the argument that the new rules won't reduce the number of plays. We can do this by comparing college results in this area to results in the NFL, on which the new NCAA rules are modeled. Based on its regular season statistics, the so-called 40/25 clock in the pros led to a demonstrable slowdown last year compared to the 25-second clock in the college game: There is no reason to believe the college numbers won't resemble the pro numbers under the same conditions. The kids might have less incentive to hurry, actually, if they're a big underdog, or if there is confusion that takes a few extra seconds to sort without the benefit of an offensive coordinator barking directly into the quarterback's helmet. If the 40-second clock is a wash (I don't think it will be), the new out-of-bounds rule will have a clock-shaving effect akin to the NFL's practice of running the clock after first down plays, with the same end result: fewer plays. It will also be much easier for offenses with a late lead to bleed the final minutes to death; NFL teams now can kneel down beginning all the way back at the two minute warning if the defense is out of timeouts, as the Saints have done on a couple of occasions under Sean Payton.
Three seconds per snap or nine snaps per team may not seem like a significant difference, but week after week, a loss of 18 total plays per game will work out to about two-and-a-half or three possessions per game down the drain. That will probably be worth a decline of about 4-5 points every week, if the similar losses under the dreaded 3-2-5e are any indication. Any guess that the 40/25 clock will somehow increase plays is based on teams moving to the line quickly - "on consistent pace of play," in the words of the NCAA rep who responded to Orson's readers - but there is no incentive for offenses to take any less time than the rules afford. There's no way to predict the future with certainty, but the data from our "control group" (the NFL) indicates the number of plays will go down.

Aside from the incremental loss of football and increase in standing around, the larger point is that there is no problem with the existing rules. If games were too long (they're not), the culprit isn't the clock. The culprit is increased commercialization. Obviously, advertising isn't going anywhere; its expansion is natural as the game becomes more popular and more profitable. But its expansion at the expense of the game is insulting. The rules are not the problem. Market if you must, but consumers have the right to draw the line when the product is carved to suit the advertising.

Update [2008-2-19 8:10:17 by SMQ]: The Wiz and CFB Stats look at the network data and reach the same conclusion: the rules are not the problem. If there is a problem, that is, which there is not.

Great programs on hard times.
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Nationally, aside from its obviously dominant teams from 1990-92, Washington probably doesn't get its due as a consistent power over the last quarter century. Under three different head coaches from 1975-2002, in fact, the Huskies were the best program in the Pac Ten by a decent margin, won eight conference championships and had 26 straight winning seasons. The post-Neuheislian malaise, though, has been a cruel, bitter pill:

"Improvement" has been the buzz from the moment Ty Willingham was hired, and it hasn't been confined to the Seattle faithful clinging to their latte macchiatos (light on the foam): a very willing national media briefly ranked the Huskies in the top 25 after a 4-1 start in 2006 and a 2-0 start last year. From there, they lost six straight and nine of eleven, respectively, and wealthy alums were offering to create scholarships in honor of Willingham's termination.

What Went Wrong: Anything involving an airborne ball last year was likely to end in disaster, whether it was leaving the supercharged but erratic right arm of Jake Locker or against the equally inconsistent coverage of the Husky secondary. Locker had easily the worst completion percentage among regular Pac Ten starters and the next-to-worst pass efficiency rating; no quarterback in the NCAA's top 100 in efficiency finished below a 52 percent completion rate, where Locker (nowhere near the top 100) completed just a little over 47 percent. After an opening cake walk at Syracuse, he threw at least one interception in every game he finished except one, in which the redshirt freshman was 6 of 14 for 16 yards and had to leave the game against Oregon State.

On the other side, U-Dub was the bottom-feeding unit in the conference across the board: tenth in rush defense, tenth in pass efficiency defense, tenth in total defense. Only the generosity of Washington State's D kept the Huskies out of tenth in scoring defense, too, and that didn't stop Alex Brink from throwing five touchdown passes and bringing WSU from behind to win a predictably pinball-ish Apple Cup, 42-35. Washington played six games in `07 against ranked opponents, and those offenses averaged 260 rushing on 5.7 per carry, a lot of that coming from a single, devastating afternoon by the pre-Dixon injury Oregon machine: 62 carries, 465 yards, six touchdowns. Even aside from that disaster, though, the only teams that encountered any kind of trouble moving the ball on Washington were Syracuse and Stanford.

What Went At Least Moderately Right: Unreliable as he was as a passer, Locker was a beast of a read option runner, accounting for over 1,100 yards before sacks despite missing a full game and a half. Louis Rankin's 1,300 yards are a little misleading (he had four huge games against terrible defenses amid twice as many mediocre days against tougher opposition) and he's graduating, anyway, but  given the nondescript stagnation of the running game since the 2000 Rose Bowl season, Locker's entry to the equation was a significant boost - "one-dimensional," after all, is better than "no dimensional." The "tougher opposition" also shouldn't be discounted: few offenses of any variety were successful against Boise State, Ohio State, UCLA, USC, Arizona State and Oregon State, all of which finished in the top 30 nationally in total defense.

Changes, Building Blocks and Other Cautious Optimism: Locker looks and runs like Tim Tebow and has the arm to be this year's version of Juice Williams, another athletic, subpar passer who advanced from raw meat in the pocket as a freshman to a competent, somewhat balanced quarterback whose team wound up in the Rose Bowl as a sophomore. When you can really run in a system designed to exploit that ability for all it's worth, the passing only has to be good enough that it's not a liability. There is nothing physically keeping Locker from making that progression. Don't get carried away by the "Rose Bowl" part of that comparison (Washington was not nearly as close to a breakout season last year as Illinois was in 2006) but also know that every overworked defensive coordinator in the Pac Ten wakes up after collapsing on his desk at night with "No. 10" stained on his face and brain. All the other skill talent will be new, so this team's immediate hopes read Locker, Locker, Locker.

Obstacles: Again, all the other skill talent will be new, along with three-fourths of the secondary before the rest of the defense's ongoing incompetence comes into play. And, what, you were expecting a break in the nation's most brutal schedule? The 2008 slate throws BYU, Oklahoma and rebuilding but talent-soaked Notre Dame into the mix.  This is Ty's make-or-break year, and even an optimistic team will go into the season expecting ot be the underdog in eight of its first ten games.

Target Date For Resumption of Glory: Again, Willingham has no grace period. By the start of November, if there is any hope, his team should be in the 4-3/3-4 range with a visit to USC standing as the pivot of the season. It won't be so much about winning that game - close calls the last two years notwithstanding, forecasting a Husky win in L.A. is out of the question - as it will be putting up a fight and building momentum for the mandatory bowl push over the last four games, which are all winnable. Come out of `08 strong, and the immediate future with one of the best all-purpose quarterbacks in the country is bright. Fizzle down the stretch for the third year in a row, and 2009 is just another rebuilding year under a new regime.

Les Miles will be announcing his new co-defensive coordinators and special teams coach today, and - more importantly - possibly also addressing the Official Wild Rumor of the Weekend: Ryan Perrilloux has been booted (again) from LSU.

Fanblogs' Kevin Donahue poked around and came up with a scenario:

Reportedly, thousands of people with various levels of interest were informed of Perrilloux's empty locker by New Orleans TV station WDSU Saturday, but for anyone else, the story is shrouded in deafening secrecy. The station has nothing online, and none of the state's mainstream papers - the Times-Picayune, Baton Rouge Advocate or Shreveport Times - have anything aside from the afore-linked note by the Advocate's Glenn Guilbeaux that Miles may address the story today. Or he may not. Web stalwart "Dandy Don" has heard nothing substantial and would, against a good deal of past evidence, "be very surprised if Perrilloux is in any kind of trouble with Les Miles and the coaching staff," but I wouldn't trust Don about anything except the final score, maybe.

If you're looking for delicious, wildly overwrought rumors, one place you will not find them is the biggest LSU message board, the fecally-themed Tiger Droppings. Admins there are banning any form of Perrilloux speculation with a singleminded fury, which would seem to defeat the purpose of a message board. The only posts that have survived on the subject are this thread from last week on the quarterback's father passing, sarcastic questions about Jarrett Lee, the highly recruited redshirt freshman and prospective starter if Perrilloux gets the boot, and some thread headlined "RP" that speculates on his love of soda and ice cream. There are stray references to Perrilloux as "the cancer," underpinning the question "Do some of you want RP to fail?" Maybe - black quarterbacks in Louisiana are always thought by some segment of the local commentariat to be one misstep from an avalanche of fan hatred - but you will find nothing therein about his status on the team. If you can't post irresponsible and wholly unsubstantiated rumor with only the flimsiest basis in reality, what else is there?

Given his recent past - the infamous "four Heismans" prediction, alleged involvement in a federal counterfeiting ring, an arrest at a casino door (in a state that would put alcohol in the water supply if it could engineer it, no less) that earned a summer-long suspension from the team last year - there's nothing surprising about the thin ice under Perrilloux's feet cracking again; last summer, I even doubted the school's most hyped recruit of the last decade would ever suit up for LSU again. The complicating issue this time, obviously, is the death of the elder Perrilloux, which seems like a quite reasonable excuse to leave the team for a while in the middle of the offseason, and for slightly crazy fan/TV station reaction.

The Tigers start Spring practice March 4. If Miles doesn't deliver another "Have a great day" barrage at trigger-happy TV rumormongers today, there is some good chance his starting quarterback won't be there.

Update [2008-2-18 18:42:24 by SMQ]: Perrilloux is gone gone gone per Les Miles: "Ryan has been suspended indefinitely due to his failure to follow team rules." Have a great day.

Of course, he said that last May, too. 'Indefinite' leaves some significant wiggle room, but Jarrett Lee is the man until further notice. Hell, he could own every passing record by the time he's done! Perri-whoux?

From a reader: "What's the purpose of the 6-7 men on the line of scrimmage rule?  What exactly is the rule?  Often the linemen are lined up slightly off the ball, but they're considered on the LOS."
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The basis for the seven-man rule (it is always seven men on the line of scrimmage for the offense and field goal/PAT/punting units, in all circumstances, never six or eight men) is so ingrained in modern strategy that it's barely mentioned, even though it's at the heart of every system, formation and non-trick play devised for the last hundred years. A lot of fans probably don't understand what makes an "illegal formation" illegal, or why it's illegal to begin with.

The reason: death. Or something like that, according to the turn-of-the-century prohibitionists who attacked football in the same vein as poverty and alcohol. Most teams by 1889 (the year after the rugby-influenced rule restricting any teammate from running in front of the ballcarrier was rescinded) used some variation of the slow-moving "V wedge" on kickoffs, which functioned something like a World War I trench attack looking for a breakthrough in opposing defensive lines. Kick returns still employ the wedge concept, but the really dangerous innovation was Harvard coach Lorin E. Deland's "fling wedge," described thusly in a game against Yale in 1892: The flying wedge and other "mass" formations were specifically outlawed in 1894 by restrincting the number of men who could go in motion before the snap to three, but under the new scrimmage system, coaches used the same concept to pull their linemen into the backfield to allow a running start, send backs in motion before the snap, and still achieve momentum toward the line. The most effective way for the defense to "bust the wedge" of oncoming blockers was the bloody business of hurling itself at their knees. The subsequent carnage (and, it should be noted, the regular cheap shots and fist fights accompanying it, which had nothing to do with rules and everything to do with pure, seething hate) was enough to force Teddy Roosevelt to threaten to outlaw the entire sport in 1905, with the result of introducing helmets, knee pads, the forward pass and, in 1910, a rule mandating seven men on the line of scrimmage and restricting motion to keep the offense from gaining momentum toward the line.

This restriction more than any other is the main reason offensive philosophy is more cyclical than evolutionary, because the five-man interior line is a staple almost by definition - if you have to have five guys on the field who are not eligible for a pass and have to line up along the line of scrimmage, they may as well be the most giant monsters you can get your hands on to push the other team around - and there are only so many options with the rest of the guys on the field. That's why your standard formation for years has looked like this:

You can mix and match the eligible players (both WRs, the TE and the running backs) and move them anywhere you like, as long as two of them are somewhere along the line of scrimmage and somebody is available to take the snap, but even when you spread the field...

...it's just moving a couple of pieces on the board. It's worthless to try to stretch the ineligible linemen across the field when the only function available to them, by rule, is blocking. Because of the seven-man restriction, there is a very limited set of alignment possibilities among the five eligible receivers, which allows defenses to make some automatic assumptions and makes the eligible/ineligible distinction pretty easy to spot when those possibilities become familiar.

Those assumptions can be (though very rarely are) exploited. LSU, for example, took advantage of the quick calculations defenders make in their alignment in the BCS championship game, when they came out near the Ohio State goalline in a weird formation that looked something like this:

A defender looking at that formation would reflexively discount the "TE" at the end of the line, because that spot is always occupied by an ineligible offensive lineman. But LSU snuck tight end Richard Dickson into the left tackle spot (he is eligible for a pass because the WR to that side of the formation is not on the line; that receiver is "replaced" on the line by the LT who lined up split wide to the opposite side of the formation, but who remains ineligible for a pass because he is covered by another WR) and hurried the snap before Ohio State could react to who was where. The result:

It's the kind of thing that only works once, though.

As far as penalties, illegal formation flags are almost always the wide receiver's fault: officials announce the number of the last lineman on the line, but the receiver who didn't establish himself as the seventh man is the culprit. As far as linemen not lining up along the line, sometimes a tackle anxious to get into pass protection is hit with a flag if he's too far behind the line, but it's so common as passing increases that officials let it slide unless the guy's egregiously in the backfield. It's a judgment call, and frustratingly ticky-tack when whistled.

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If you have any kind of question for CFB Explainer, send it along to sundaymorningqb-at-yah00, etc. You'll be glad you did.

If not for you, winter would have no spring
I couldn't hear the robins sing
I just wouldn't have a clue
Anyway it wouldn't ring true
If not for you
- - -

A new-ish reader e-mailed me this week, a Big Ten fan, bewildered and alienated by the characteristic aloofness of the SEC. The Southeastern and Big Ten are soulmates by nature, lately the SEC has grown arrogant, preening, disrespectful of the Big Ten as a conference. The years of taunts, chants and jeers finally crossed the line.

You say 'potato,' I say, 'protect the integrity of the bowl system.' Let's call the whole thing off?

I got into this mess last year, to no avail, and my only advice now is: Give it time, man. If the SEC needs its space, let it go. It'll be back. They always come back. Once those oats are sown, it will wake up from another Liberty Bowl tryst with Conference USA with a splitting headache and a new tatoo and look at itself in C-USA's dingy mirror and think, "There's more to being a hegemonic super conference that this."

Sometime after that, the Big Ten and SEC will find themselves at home again on Saturday night, alone, after even the MAC said it was busy. And then later they'll stagger out feeling sorry for themselves, and randomly bump into one another at the old bar where they first met (it was called "The Citrus" then, or something, before downtown got all corporate). They'll be defensive, at first, contending they're only there as a lower seed, and it's not, like a routine. But the games won't last long, when they swallow their pride, start catching up, laughing until the bartender says, "Time to get a room," or something to that effect, and they realize all over again how perfect they really are for each other, and how empty life is when you're apart from the one you belong with. That's when you'll know it's for real.

Because no matter how many rivalries you share with the ACC, or how many bowl tie-ins you negotiate with the Pac Ten, when it comes together - when it's just right - that's when you know. It's that certain glimmer in their eye, a subtle quiver in your voice, the din of a small city packed inside of a towering concrete shrine wafting from miles away, that barely perceptible little way they perfectly complement your head-to-head record in bowl games over the last eleven years. It's only a matter of time before Mike Slive and Jim Delaney gaze longingly into each other's eyes and whisper, breathlessly, "You complete me."

Happy Valentine's Day, you crazy kids.

Absolutely no love this Valentine's Day for the NCAA Rules Committee, which continued its never-ending quest Wednesday to break what was already fixed. The bizarre, football-stealing spectre of 3-2-5-e was hated by one and all from the moment it was adopted in 2006, and subsequently - wisely and mercifully - repealed, a day of great celebration. No harm, no foul, guys.

But no, no, why did you have to do this:

Why does the Rules Committee hate football?
Make no mistake: fifteen extra seconds on the play clock is a dramatic, terrible change, and will fail miserably at its attempt to maintain plays and scoring at 2007 levels. Lengthening the play clock produces less plays, and therefore less scoring. If teams take advantage of even half the extra time this rule makes available - let's project a five-second per play increase, to offset plays where the clock remains at 25 seconds (a problem in itself, in staffs and players having to always be aware of which situation they're in) and just to be really, really conservative - this is what you lose in the aggregate:

Based on games and plays last year, we arrive at 108,194 plays over 1,504 games involving I-A teams, about 71.9 plays per team per game (we'll round up to 72). That's 144 plays per game. At 3,600 seconds per game (60 seconds X 60 minutes), that's exactly one play every 25 seconds. If increased time on the play clock allows teams to take 30 seconds per play - again, a conservative estimate - the number drops to 120 plays, 60 per team, a loss of something like three full possessions every game. If it allows enough of a slow down to average 35 seconds per play, the average drops to about 51 plays per team, almost a full 30 percent decline.

That's a staggering decline in actual football in favor of standing around (and commercials, which of course will not be cut), and also in favor of taking knees: 15 more seconds of standing around between every play means 45 extra seconds per three-down series if the clock is running, extending the amount of time that can reasonably be run off by kneel-downs from a little over a minute to a full two minutes. The committee should be devising rules that encourage last-second drama, not choke it out of existence (it's already hard enough to orchestrate a drive in the dying minutes, says Kevin Riley).

This is a much greater hit than 3-2-5-e, which eventually cost about 16 plays and five points per game from 2005-06. The impact under the new, completely unnecessary change will probably be double that.

I reiterate what I said about that bogus rule two years ago: "[L]ong football games are not a problem. Such angst short of three and a half hours is entirely manufactured, and, one would guess, mostly by "fans" who like to tailgate and dress up and drink and engage in non-violent mob whooping and chanting, but ultimately don't really like football all that much." Double that sentiment now.

Three hours, twenty-two minutes is not a long time. One of the greatest advantages college football holds over the NFL is the sheer number of plays facilitated by its clock rules, which have always allowed fewer seconds to tick away between snaps and stopped the clock after first downs, an invaluable aid to creating morea action, more scoring and more exciting comebacks that define memorable games for the casual fan. No one except your girlfriend and prolific fogey John Feinstein complains about the length of football games, and one of them hasn't been right about anything in 20 years (hint: your girlfriend is right about everything, except wanting to leave the game early). Again, the greatest time-waster - commercials - will never be touched; instead, the level of actual activity is reduced to the point that commercials:plays will be pretty close to a 1:1 ratio, as it's been in the pros for years, to the tremendous frustration of people more interested in getting into the flow of a game than the opportunity to go to the bathroom or watching twee-yuns! or other such nonsense.

This is a disaster, and just like its predecessor, won't survive next year's review.