Really? When is the NCAA just going to let the kids play?

By the way, your avatar is hilarious. It may be my favorite avatar from the ones I’ve seen here.

Just for discussion sake, I’ll offer some counterpoint to your prose. (For the record, I worry about the NCAA and NFL overtweaking the ruls and turning football into a legal battle rather than an athletic battle, but there are some good things to consider in their favor.) I think that the biggest problem is that the athletes have become bigger, faster, and stronger to the point that their potential for high-energy collisions has outweighed their ability to receive such transfers. (Yeah, I’m devolving into engineer-speak here. Hang on.) With both bigger and faster athletes comes increased kinetic energy; with stronger athletes comes an increased ability to transmit force. All this creates energy transfer at the point of impact, and from a material standpoint, the athlete’s ability to absorb that transfer is limited by his material toughness. Toughness is a product of the amount of energy they can receive and the amount of strain their body can endure before breaking. Flexibility increases the strain threshold, but the energy absorption threshold cannot be increased without sacrificing some of the bigger, faster, stronger that everybody covets so much.

So the athletes all train to give more punishment than ever before, but they have no more ability to receive such punishment. Along with that, medical advances are allowing for far more precise detection of damage, and the increased media attention has allowed for very quick knowledge of such damage among the general public. It creates a bit of a perfect storm where the injury rates can be easily tracked and compared. The leagues then have to show that they are monitoring such things (and I don’t think it’s mere show; I think the leagues take it very seriously), and those same medical advances allow them to pinpoint the most likely causes of injury, isolate those cause, and recommend preventative measures.

As an example of the increased risk of injury, note the increased frequency of knee injuries during preseasons. It’s not that people don’t know how to train the knees for use and abuse, it’s that the knee is physically limited as to how much damage may be imparted to it. If people begin to be born with tougher, more efficient knees, then the threshold will increase and the cycle will start over again.

The same goes for backs and horse collars. Certainly I’m no medical expert, but the structure of the spine has not changed significantly in the last several hundred years at least. We’re training the muscles to operate very near their theoretical maxima, but the cartilege, ligaments, etc. can only handle so much. That is what the leagues are seeing, and so they are trying to use rules to compensate for a lack of development in the ability to receive such punishment.

Phew. I hope that wasn’t too much. But that’s the counter-argument. Take or leave it as you will. It’s a very contentious argument and there is no black-and-white to it.

and the NCAA decision makers stand up and say “yea! what he said!”

We learned from Wisconsin that it’s easy for the NCAA to change clock rules without finding all of the unintended consequences. (I absolutely loved the egregiously offside kickoffs.) To be honest, I haven’t put a whole lot of thought into it, but I do agree with you; there is room for abuse with the new clock rules. Think of it this way:

If an average play lasts 5 seconds (I don’t know how close this is, but it’ll work for argument), then there are theoretically 45 game clock seconds available per play. Let’s round that down a touch and say that a team decides to use 40 seconds per play (so 35 seconds between plays). They would then average 3 plays per 2 minutes of game clock. If they convert one 3rd down on a drive that gets only one 1st down, then you have 3 plays + 4 plays (including a punt) = 7 plays. 7 plays / (1.5 plays/minute) = 5 minutes, 40 seconds of game clock. That’s a lot of clock-killing.

Another number crunch with 2 minutes per 3 plays gives you just over 22 plays per quarter, or 90 plays in a game if both teams decide on a snail’s pace. Previously, the average number of plays was closer to 120, so you have the chance to cut it down by 25%. (Obviously, it won’t work out that way in a real game.) But still, you could cut a quarter down to 2 offensive possessions with a good running game.

The spread teams see this as an opportunity to run their plays faster, as the officials are supposed to spot the ball more quickly. But the power teams get a great 4th quarter advantage. I think you’ll initially see the spread teams enjoy the advantage because the defensive strategies against the spread are not yet fully developed. But I think you’ll see the power running games enjoy the longer-term advantage once the spread is countered and merely becomes another offensive option.

As for Wisconsin variations to clock management, we’ll have to wait and see.

Neither team seems to be assertive enough to grow out of their “little brother” / “underodg” role even though both are clearly much more of a factor in their conferences as they would like to assume. Granted Auburn doesn’t play Akron, Freso State, and Cal Poly all in the same season, but truth be told both schools play up the underrated sympathy to make it seem like they get better every year.

However, my main point rests in the hands of the new NCAA rules and how they will effect certain teams. At first glance i feel that the Texas Tech’s and previosly colt-brennan-led Hawaii’s are in dire opposition to a 4-second clock. Then as i think more i realize that the names to throw out there are more like BYU, Louisville, and Tennessee. (Thats right, i said it.) It almost slipped my mind that Ainge attempted more passes than any other QB in the SEC last year, and ranked 10th nationally (higher than colt brennan, even.) The Tradition that used to be set in Knoxville was “run it at em’ and make ’em stop it.” Truthfully we may have have moved much furhter from hard nosed football than we realize. Last year only 4 teams in the SEC passed more times than they ran South Carolina, Kentucky, Ole Miss and you guessed it…Tennessee. Tennessee being the most lopsided.

http://www.tennessean.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20080804/SPORTS0601/808040325/1035

The West coast/spread-ish Clawfense will probably mean a similar mismatch in the run/pass ratio again this season. I feel like this new 40-second clock does more harm than good particularly to us when we play teams like georgia, and Auburn. The loaded secondary and hopeful defensive fron with some “tackling problems” starts to be a bit more worrisome. I think the clock will help with time in adjusting to the game-pace of the clawfense, but it may help even weaker teams with powerbacks (dare i say like hmmm UAB) keep games low scoring and close. The bigger question though is what does rocky top talk nation think?