XFL Plans To Speed Up Football With a Running Clock
The NFL is infamous for making a game with 60 minutes of clock last forever.
The league just gets slower and slower, especially since the running game has been all but abandoned in favor of the pass, which leads to a lot more stoppages for incompletions and plays that are far more likely to end up along the sideline where they’re ended when the ball carrier is pushed out of bounds.
If anyone in the entire football universe is hell bent for leather on making American football fun again, it’s Vince McMahon.
Which is why McMahon is taking a page from the sport that just about every other country in the world calls football and we Yanks call soccer and introducing the continuous running clock.
That is to say that except for timeouts and two-minute drills, the clock will be ticking down constantly, putting the emphasis on flow of the game.
The XFL’s director of operations, Sam Schwartzstein — and you’ve gotta love a guy whose name basically means “black beer mug” in German — explained the changes.
“Fans want to minimize idle time and speed up the game,” Schwartzstein said. “We look at the play clock as one of the big things we want to change. Fans want more plays — less stall, more ball.”
The XFL has an active YouTube channel where it’s keeping the public informed on why its brand of football is better, and the latest rule changes are explained there:
Of course, if your attitude is “less stall, more ball,” you need to be able to get around the problems that come when a pass sails out of bounds or the offense takes its sweet time getting upfield before running the next play, and for that, the XFL has a solution as well.
It will be employing “ball spotters” — special officials who will make sure that next ball is ready to be snapped as quickly as the team that’s behind by a mile and trying to engineer a comeback can keep the drive going.
Those ball spotters will be supplemental to the regular officiating crew, so referees won’t have to be out of position worrying about the ball; they can get just as ready to call the next play as the players are.
The whole thing, in theory, should markedly speed up the game.
On top of that, it also means teams will be able to use the whole field on every down, every distance and every clock situation.
Unless it’s the last two minutes, there’s no benefit to running out of bounds to stop the clock; the clock will just keep running.
And likewise, a team that’s ahead and trying to chew clock can play all the way out to the sidelines knowing that if their guy goes out of bounds, it won’t stop the clock and give the other team an advantage; this may end up leading to a lot of “dagger” touchdowns as a guy gets outside and breaks a run down the sideline.
In other words, one small rule change will have a ton of knock-on effects, the bulk of which look poised to benefit more yards and more scoring if used by clever coaches.
Of course, having a running clock might have the opposite effect of the stated goal of “more plays.”
The XFL has been down at Missippi Gulf Coast Community College trying out some of the new rules in intrasquad scrimmages between the school’s players, and it is just that sort of field testing that should get the bugs out of the league’s innovations before the first real games are played in 2020.
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