UF coach Urban Meyer thinks the NCAA's new clock rules are awful.
After taking a look at the Gators' offensive stats this season through three games, he noticed some things were missing.
"What in the hell?" Meyer said at Monday's press conference. "Where are the points? Where are the yards? What are we doing?"
Meyer also said that UF athletics director Jeremy Foley contacted Southeastern Conference commissioner Mike Slive about the rule Meyer thinks is robbing people of plays.
"I'm not a fan of the clock rule, I feel like they are cheating the fans," Meyer said. "More importantly the players … need more plays."
The NCAA changed rules dealing with the clock this off-season intending to shorten the length of games. It was the third year in a row the NCAA tinkered with the clock.
The rule changes are doing their job -games are 14 minutes shorter on average than last year - but they're also creating confusion and frustration in the Gators' offense.
"The hardest thing with it is now it's like three years in a row that they've kinda changed the makeup of the game," offensive coordinator Dan Mullen said. "We don't know how it's going to affect us. You're adjusting on the fly for the third straight year."
Last year, the NCAA used a 25-second play clock that did not begin until referees set the ball at the line of scrimmage. This season, teams have 40 seconds to get off a play, and the clock starts the second the previous play is declared dead.
But what makes the time tick by even faster is the new out-of-bounds rule. In previous years, when a runner went out of bounds, the game clock did not start until the ball was snapped on the next play. This year, the game clock ticks once the referee sets the ball.
The shortened game hurts the Gators most in the number of plays they are able to get off. Against Tennessee, Meyer said his UF team got 46 "competitive" plays, meaning plays where they actually tried to score as opposed to kneel-downs or running the clock out at the end. (UF had 54 total offensive plays on the day.) The team averaged 65.2 plays per game in 2007.
Junior quarterback Tim Tebow weighed in as well on Monday, agreeing with his coach's opinion and adding that the rules stop the Gators from improving.
"The new clock rules have taken at least two or three drives away from us," Tebow said. "It's really frustrating because we feel that the longer we play, the better we get, and the better opportunity we have to beat people. … That's just the game now."
Though the decline can't be entirely attributed to the smaller amount of plays, Tebow threw just 15 passes against the Volunteers on Saturday. He completed eight of them for 96 yards and two touchdowns.
Sophomore running back Emmanuel Moody also expressed displeasure with the new system.
"We just feel like there's more urgency now, more than there was before," Moody said. "We feel like when we're on offense we have to score because we might not get the ball until the next quarter."
