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The NCAA is constantly tinkering with the rules that govern college football, and it may be on the verge of instituting another change that could bring the two-minute warning to the sport.
There are plenty of differences between college football and the NFL, including rules governing pass interference, the ability to keep running after going down on the turf, and the number of feet you need to have in bounds for a catch to count.
Prior to the start of the 2023 season, NCAA rules also dictated the clock needed to temporarily stop following a first down until the officials were able to move the chains to the new line of scrimmage (a change that was initially instituted in 1967), which is not the case in the NFL.
However, the rulebook was tweaked to keep the clock running on those plays (with the exception of the last two minutes of each half) in an attempt to speed up games. The change didn’t have a dramatic effect, although it did reduce the length of the average contest by close to four minutes while eliminating around five plays per game compared to the previous year.
College football has also never featured the two-minute warning, a relic of the past that can be traced back to the days when NFL officials were tasked with running the clock and used the break as a chance to let teams (and fans) know how much time was remaining.
While that practice became antiquated in the 1960s, the NFL opted to stick with the two-minute warning, which can be a pretty important aspect of late-game strategy for teams who need all of the time (and the timeouts) they can get.
According to The Athletic, the NCAA is now tinkering with the idea of bringing the two-minute warning to college football, as the governing body’s rules committee is expected to discuss that possibility during the offseason.
It doesn’t seem like there’s a major push to institute the potential change as soon as possible, and while it does appear it would be counterintuitive to the push to shorten games at first glance, it’s possible the break could simply replace one of the rescheduled TV timeouts scheduled for earlier in the quarter (although it’s kind of hard to imagine networks would willingly pass up the chance to insert even more ads into a game).
I’d argue it would be a welcome change thanks to the intrigue the two-minute warning adds at the NFL level, but we’ll just have to wait and see how things pan out.