SOUTHEASTERN CONFERENCE FOOTBALL MEDIA DAYS

July 21, 2026

John McDaid

Coordinator of Football Officials

Press Conference

THE MODERATOR: We are pleased to be joined by the coordinator of football officials for the Southeastern Conference, John McDaid. He has a presentation for you this morning. John.

JOHN McDAID: I'm John McDaid, the coordinator of officials in the Southeastern Conference. I'm going into my seventh season now in the SEC after coming off the field after being an SEC official.

I appreciate your interest in being here this early, although my recollection is we've been definitely earlier in years past. I think we got a little reprieve because of the fact we're in the Eastern Time zone instead of the Central Time zone.

This offseason has been as active as any I have had since being in this position, particularly for one specific rule change that's occurring for this season that I'll talk about here in a second.

I spent this spring, amongst other things, visiting 11 of our schools. Every calendar year I visit our schools once. And if I don't do it in the spring, I visit the remainder of them in August. I prioritize the schools that had -- the six schools that have new coaches, but even those new coaches I had familiarity with. One changed obviously from one school to the other, and we had two that were coordinators in the conference that I knew previously. They're now head coaches.

Coach Sumrall at Florida three years ago was a head coach at Troy. As you know, I have the Sun Belt officiating as part of my officiating consortium, my officiating program, and I got to know Coach Sumrall when he was at Troy University.

I'm not presenting any of the usual data up front about average game times and average number of plays per game, scoring per game, replay stops per game. They're all basically trending flat. I wanted to take some time to really deep dive on one particular topic and wanted to reserve my time for that.

That's what we're going to spend the bulk of the time talking about, are the new rules, and in particular, one that has our coaches talking about quite a bit, particularly back in the spring.

The punt game. We've had a rule since the early '80s of creating what we call numbering exceptions such that the punt team can get legal in their formation prior to the snap.

And let's make sure we understand. The punt play is fairly unique in that, when you think about it, you have defense versus defense on the field. The kicking team wants to put defenders on the field because 98-plus percent of the time they're planning on creating a change of possession.

They're going to kick the ball back to their opponent, and they want athletes on the field that have a high ability to run 45 yards downfield, and if not pressure their opponent to make a fair catch, to make an open-field tackle.

The receiving team has defense on the field because, first and foremost after the snap, they need to defend against the potential run or pass. In those less than 2% of the times, there's a fake. And only after they're assured that's not going to happen do they get back and set up a punt return.

That is what the numbering exception rule is all about. And there has been a lot of discussion, particularly about the coaches, about what the rule is and why they don't like it. I understand why they don't like it, and I'll get there in a second.

I wanted to spend some time today talking about how we got to where we were at the end of the last season and why we needed that change.

If you bear with me here, I'm going to talk about the evolution of three major elements of our playing rules. It's going to feel like we're in the College Football Hall of Fame here for a few slides, but I promise you it's all going to tie together here at the end to explain how we got to where we were at the end of last season.

So 1906, the -- after 1905, the preseason going into 1906 was a seminal year when it came to college football, which was more or less the only football in the country. At the end of the 1905 season, there was a lot of uproar about the game because of the amount of not just catastrophic injuries but deaths that were happening on the field, primarily because of the mass-momentum plays that were being used.

You're probably familiar with this. The White House got involved as well, calling in the leaders of college football to make rule changes to open it up and get away from these mass-momentum plays. And there was a variety of things they talked about and considered. There was a variety of things they adopted. But by far, the most -- in some of the coaches' minds, the most radical thing they did was introduce the legality of the forward pass.

The reason this is important in the context of what we're talking about for the numbering exception rule is the introduction of the forward pass was the moment when we created the idea of ineligible players. There was no such thing as an ineligible player before the forward pass because we weren't talking about pass eligibility.

The rules right out of the gate in 1906 said that at least five players are ineligible. And there was a sixth player: A quarterback under center was also an ineligible player back in those days. That rule still is the rule today in the National Football League. Only a quarterback in shotgun formation is an eligible receiver.

The second major rule element we'll talk about here is the substitution rules. The founders of the game were very much all about two-way players, sometimes referred to as the iron man concept. They literally had teams in the late 19th century, early 20th century where there was literally 11 players that were suited up to play the game. They played every single down. There were no substitutes.

Leading up to 1941, the substitution rules had loosened a bit. But they essentially were, at that point in time, you could sub out once a half, and you could not go back in the game until the second half. You could come out once in the first half. You could come out once in the second half, and that was it.

1941, with the war and the number of college-aged men that were going off to be enlisted in the armed services, there was concern about trying to make up roster size and makeup. And they relaxed the substitution rules, and they created unlimited substitution in 1941.

And they didn't realize it at the time, but very quickly there were coaches that started taking advantage of it where they created what we call two-platoon football, where you have a set of players that are your offensive players and a set of players that are your defensive players.

Right off the bat in 1941, this set off a conflict between the conservatives of we want just 11 players, two-way football, iron man football, and the people that wanted a liberalization of the rule.

For the next 12 years, they bickered back and forth on this. What ultimately changed things back is the smaller schools couldn't keep up with the larger schools as far as roster size. If you had unlimited substitution and your roster was, let's say, 70 players and your opponent's was just 25, you had a marked advantage.

In 1953 they took away unlimited substitution, and they went back to where you could, I believe it was, substitute once per quarter throughout a game.

And then it slid. They kept loosening and loosening and loosening. And finally, in 1965, they re-instituted unlimited substitutions. And the substitution rules, more or less, are the same today.

This brought specialization to the game. And when we say specialists in football, a lot of times what is immediately conjured up is we're talking quarterbacks, talking receivers, running backs. We're talking about kick returners.

Unlimited substitution, two-platoon football, allowed you to specialize in every position on the field, including offensive linemen.

You're all familiar with the Outland Trophy. It's been awarded since 1946 to the top interior linemen in the nation.

I went and looked at the list of Outland Trophy winners over the years, and I picked out offensive linemen that have won over that period of time. Let's look at a progression to help illustrate one of the points that I want to make.

This is Bob Gain from the University of Kentucky. Won the award in 1950. Played at 215 pounds.

This is Zeke Smith. Played at Auburn University. 1956, he was an award winner, and he played at 235 pounds.

Tommy Nobis of Texas, 1965, at 240 pounds.

John Hicks at The Ohio State University, winner in 1973, played at 258 pounds.

And then the great Dave Rimington at the University of Nebraska, award winner in 1981, played at 288 pounds.

You see that there's definitely a progression of not only larger players, but they're heavier players. Why is this important given today's topic? Bear with me. I'll come back to it.

The third major element is player numbering and offensive interior linemen rules and requirements. In 1908, two years after they passed the rules for the forward pass, Washington and Lee became the first team to wear numbers on their players.

Prior to 1908, no one had done it. For a period of time after 1908, not all teams were wearing numbers.

In 1910, they made -- there needed to be at least seven linemen, and they did this again to try to defeat the use of mass-momentum plays.

This is a curious progression. In 1950 player numbering was recommended, in 1921 it was urged, and in 1937 player numbering finally became mandatory: You must wear a number on your jersey.

In 1939 the rules for what we know today as ineligible downfield was created because they were having problems with offensive linemen on screen-type passes blocking, such that it either created offensive pass interference or blocking as what we know today -- ineligible downfield blocking beyond the line of scrimmage.

1947 was the first year that they urged -- not required, but urged -- that offensive linemen wear 50 through 79. And then finally in 1968, it wasn't until 1968 that the five ineligible players must be numbered 50 through 79. And that's what we know as offensive linemen, the interior linemen that are ineligible on every down.

Why are all three of these elements important for our punt rules? As I said earlier, punt rule -- or the punt game on the kicking side starts with a bunch of defensive players, but they must line up in a legal offensive formation to snap the ball.

Offensive linemen were no longer ideal athletes to go kick the ball, run downfield 45 yards and make an open field tackle. They become larger. Maybe more importantly, they become heavier. While they had quickness, they didn't have linear speed like we measure in the 40-yard dash. The punt coverage team wants to put defensive-minded players out there.

So what did they do about this? Well, in the mid-'60s, when the culmination of all of these rules, the evolution of all of these rules finally concluded, they start putting vests on players to make them temporarily 50 through 79. As much as Herb Vincent, Chuck Dunlap and myself tried to find a photo to illustrate this, we couldn't find one.

Through the '70s it became more prolific, and my understanding is the caretakers of the game didn't like the aesthetic of these vests. In some instances these vests weren't the same color or tint of the jersey underneath it, and it looked obvious what they were doing.

They were also very loose-fitting, which created a safety concern because your opponent could get his hand or arm caught up inside the vest of his opponent and twist it.

So by the early '80s they wanted to do something about the use of these vests. What they did, in 1981 they created the first version of what we know as the numbering exception rule for scrimmage kicks.

What this first version looked like is up to five players of the punt team could go onto the field, report to the umpire that I am going to effectively be a 50 through 79 on this down.

Over the next four seasons -- I don't know this. I'm surmising this. Over the next four seasons, the administration of that became a little tedious. So in 1985 they passed the second version of the numbering exception rule.

That rule was that if you came into the game and lined up in an interior lineman position and you were not wearing 50 through 79, you became a numbering exception. You became an ineligible player through that numbering exception.

That is more or less the rule that we had through the 2025 season last year.

Let's look at some plays. It's going to show you the evolution of the punt game, and then I'll come back and put a little tidy bow on this.

This is the 1997 Charles Woodson punt return. And I'm actually going to show you the punt return. I want to concentrate on what's going on in the offensive formation at the snap and just after the snap. We'll go back and forth and play this.

You see they're in a tight offensive formation, like you still see today in the National Football League. And you'll notice, if we go back and play this a couple of times, the interior linemen, the first thing they're doing, is they're backing up two steps. Their first priority is to make sure they're protecting the kicker. They're not thinking about getting downfield immediately in punt coverage, right?

So the numbering exception rule back in this day -- by the way, 1997 is 16 seasons after they pass the numbering exception. We went decades where this rule worked for us quite well because the kick formation was largely doing this. It was fairly easy for the kick receive team to identify who was ineligible because they were interior linemen.

By the way, there's two gunners out on the sides. You can see the one to our right. You can't see the one to our left.

They knew that these interior linemen were ineligible, and the rule worked quite well.

Let's go to our next play. The next two plays are -- stop it here -- they're both in the 2011 season. Both of them are fairly famous punt returns in the Southeastern Conference. This is Joe Adams' punt return against Tennessee in the season.

Again, look at the formation here. Very much like what you see on Sunday. Very tight. It's obvious who those five interior linemen are. In this we have a double gunner at the bottom. So the inside gunner at the bottom is actually the fifth numbering exception. That tackle up at the top is not a numbering exception. He's on the end of the line. So it's the guard snapper, other guard tackle, and then inside gunner that make the five.

Again, let's roll this forward. You're going to notice their first assignment is to take a step back, provide the protection and make sure we're not going to have a blocked punt, and then secondarily get themselves downfield to provide coverage on the return. You notice the gunners are releasing immediately to get down there.

The next play is also the 2011 season. Stop it here. This is a long punt return by Chad Bumphis, I believe. In this one you see that they're spread out a little bit more. Go ahead and play it. The first change you're going to see is they want to get a chip on an opponent, but they want to get downfield now. This is one of the evolutions of the games that started about ten years into the new century.

The other major change that you see here is we have a three-man shield. Punt coverage realized that they could protect the kicker and the ball being blocked pretty effectively with just the three-person shield. Because of that, they could release the guys at the line of scrimmage downfield after just chipping or getting an initial jam on their opponent. They're pretty confident in the athletes that they had back in the shield.

Go to the next play. This is showing you another evolution, and that is the introduction of the rugby-style kicker. With the advent of the rugby-style kicker, they wanted to stretch out the formations more. This formation is certainly stretched out more than the first two plays that we saw. We've seen plays recently, right, in the last five, ten years that are stretched out even much more than this.

The rugby-style kicker created a moving target for a team that wanted to try to block the ball. There was the proven ability for a punt shield to be effective in protecting them.

The other thing that happened here is by carrying the ball like this, they create what they call artificial hang time, right? The ball is not yet in the air, but you're giving your coverage folks more time to get downfield before the ball gets in the air, and it basically -- that's why hang time is so important. The more time it's in the air, the more time they get downfield. Artificial hang time is the kicker holding on to the ball before he even kicks it.

Let's go to the next play. Stop it here. Now I'm getting into some of the exotic things. I have two plays here that get into some of the exotic things that we've seen recently. They're going to start answering -- all this is leading up to how we got to where we were at the end of last year. This is starting to illustrate why we needed to make a change.

We have the snapper that just puts his hands on the ball. Why that's important -- this is changed for the '26. But up through the '25 season, the snapper is established when he puts his hands on the ball or his hands are near the ball.

Why that's important is when the snapper is established, that's when the officials look to lock in the numbering exceptions. We only have five players on the line of scrimmage at this point in time. We're looking for seven, and then look at the five interior to create the numbering exceptions. We can't do that.

Let's go ahead and play this little further after the shift. The scheme here is to rapidly shift like this. Stop it here. They can snap the ball now one second after all 11 players become set again.

What's been going on schematically is punt coverage was trying to disguise as much as they possibly could, and in some cases -- you'll see the next play -- confuse who the eligible players are. Let's go to that next play.

This play happened in the Southeastern Conference last year. Stop it here. This looks like a play where we have two gunners on the line of scrimmage at the top and bottom. We have five interior linemen in the middle, two on either side of the snapper. They would be -- the snapper doesn't have his hands on the ball yet, but -- go back before the shift. They would be the obvious candidates for numbering exceptions.

Then we have that slot, I'll call him, at the top of the screen, the two-person shield, and then the kicker.

Let's go to the end zone. Let's watch -- this is what we just saw. We have this. Stop it here. Now, they've tried to disguise who the numbering exceptions are. And play this back and forth for me a couple of times.

You'll notice that the snapper intentionally doesn't put his hands on the ball until after the shift starts. Go back before the shift. Let's look at the player to our left of the center, the right guard, over to No. 31 in red there.

He was an interior lineman. Now he's still an interior lineman because of the gunner that's down at the bottom of the screen, right?

Well, let's go back to the all-22. Stop it here. The gunner at the bottom isn't on the line of scrimmage. He disguised that, right? They actually have an illegal formation right now because they have five players in the backfield. Go ahead to the shift and then stop it before the snap. Stop it here.

The design of the play is the four players in the backfield are that wingback at the top, the single shield player or personal protector, the kicker, and this gunner at the bottom. If that gunner at the bottom is off the line of scrimmage, that means that player that we saw originally as the right guard, who is now at the end of the line of scrimmage at the bottom of the screen, is an ineligible player. That's the deception. Let's go ahead and run the play.

That is the intended target for the catch. It creates a 30-yard play. Let's go back again and play it from the snap. You'll see a player at the top of the screen above the SEC logo. About right now the ball is thrown. He's at the kicker's, let's say, 31. We missed a call for ineligible downfield. That player had shifted, had become a numbering exception. We didn't catch it, and we missed an ineligible downfield.

Let's go back to the slides. Actually, no, I have one more play to show you. Stop it here. This is just a random punt from the 2025 Florida team punt unit. You'll see here that they're in a pretty-easy-to-officiate formation when it comes to numbering exceptions. They have that two-by-two formation around the snapper.

Why do I show you this? I'm not even going to show you the play. Why do I show you this? The University of Florida had the top-ranked punting unit in all of FBS last year. Now, you could say, John, they had Tommy Doman as their punter. He was one of only two punters that were drafted to the National Football League. That's what helped them be the punt unit they were. And you wouldn't be wrong.

But when you are measuring all the statistics, such as not just gross yards, but net yards, number of punts inside the 20-yard line, the number of kicks that were not returned by your opponent, the net average return yards, it just doesn't take one excellent punter to create the statistics. It takes a team. It takes ten other athletes on the field. It takes a scheme and technique to make that happen.

Florida was able to be -- a pro football focus and the calculus they use to try to come up with the most effective punting unit, Florida was No. 1 in the nation. They did it schematically with a two-by-two punt formation and a three-man shield.

Let's go back to the slides. One of the basic tenets of the game, because of the forward pass, is because there's five ineligible players. Another tenet is the ineligible players are numbered 50 through 79, and they're linemen, right?

The numbering exception was created due to the specialization. It was not created, nor was it intended to be used, to confuse your opponent on who the eligible players are.

And it turns out -- I'm not too prideful to say this. It turns out, if you are very effective in confusing or deceiving the defense, you're probably pretty effective at confusing and deceiving the officials. Because we're not in the offensive-play-calling business. We don't know what play is being called just like the defense. If you confuse the defense, you're probably confusing the officials.

The play, like I just showed you in the Arkansas-Notre Dame game, shows you the why we needed the change. There was just too much deception going on using numbering exceptions to pull off trick plays. It was never intended for numbering exceptions to deliver that kind of capability as a punt coverage team, and it goes against too many basic tenets of our game.

So what is the new rule? The new rule states that if you have numbering exceptions, which is another way of saying if you do not have five 50 through 79s on the field, and they're denoted by the blue here, they must be in a two-by-two formation, two on one side of the snapper, two on the other, such that they touch -- all five of the players are touching someplace inside the tackle box that's defined as five yards laterally from either side of the ball.

This needs to be your initial formation. You can't shift into this formation. If you're going to use numbering exceptions, your initial formation must look like something like this. All the other six players can shift in motion per the rules for all scrimmage downs.

You have the option of putting five 50 through 79s in the game by putting an alternate jersey on them. We've had this for years. We typically see this because there's two athletes that have the same playing number it. One is the offensive player, and one is the defensive player. They want to put them on the same special teams unit. One of them puts a secondary jersey on to do this.

You can do this to get -- I drew one up that we see quite often. You can do this to get to or use a non-two-by-two punt formation. So there's no tackle box requirements when they do this. The snapper, as you can see here, is on the end of the line. He can be eligible. And all of the positions in gray, like I've said, can shift in motion per usual scrimmage rules.

The coaches are talking a lot about their -- I'll use the word "annoyance" -- their annoyance about having to do a mass jersey change prior to punt coverage. This is the reason why. Those coaches want to use the same schemes that they've had for previous seasons.

The new numbering exception rule and its requirement does not allow them to use those schemes, so their intent is to put five 50 through 79s on the field. The million-dollar question is how many of the teams are going to do this? I don't know the answer to that.

In fact, I just programmed my officials last week during our clinic to ask that question of every team that they see in August when they go and work the scrimmages so I have a good idea how many of the teams intend to do this when we get into Week 1.

Other notable new rules, there's just two. We now have a 10-yard penalty instead of 15 for offensive pass interference. For what it's worth, this matches what's done in the National Football League.

That's not why the rule change was made. The rule change was made because we were looking for a higher rate of success gaining a first down after incurring an offensive pass interference. And if you are penalized only 10 yards instead of 15, it stands to reason that conversion rate will go up.

The second big one, the one that I think all fans are going to identify with, is first-time offenders of targeting within a single season no longer have the possibility of a first-half carry-over game disqualification for their next game.

What it looks like is this: All of them, if you are a first-time offender, second-time offender, or three-or-more offender, you're disqualified for the remainder of the game. You can stay on the sideline, enjoy the game with your team, but you can't participate.

For the second-time offender, no matter when the targeting foul occurred, you need to sit out the first half of your next game.

Then a three-or-more-time offender, no matter when the foul occurred in the game, you're going to have to sit out an entire game. The penalty for three-or-more-time offenders hasn't changed. It's been defined for the targeting rule for some number of years.

This is an experimental rule. This will be revisited after the '26 season to see how it went and see if we want to make it permanent or maybe extend it as an experimental rule one more season for 2027.

This is the number of two-time offenders over the last five seasons and the number of three-or-more-time offenders we've had over the last five seasons. You can see we're averaging less than six over the last five seasons. We've had no three-or-more-time offenders over the last five seasons. I believe this is evidence that shows the efficacy of the targeting rule.

This data was looked at in considering this experimental penalty rule change. The definition or requirements of targeting haven't changed in any way, shape, or form.

I suspect this will be looked at after the '26 season along with how many targeting fouls did we have per game and looking to see what that trend has been when they consider if they're going to make that rule official or extended for another year as experimental.

So that's it for what I had for you today. Like we've been since Texas and Oklahoma joined the conference, we are a roster of ten on-field -- ten crews of on-field officials as well as ten replay officials. We have four collaborative replay officials that are in our Birmingham video center.

Because the Media Days are a week later than they typically are, we had our officiating clinic last week where we brought all our officials in for two and a half weeks -- two and a half weeks -- they would die -- two and a half days. Gave them a rules exam, did some physical fitness testing, and had about 12 hours of video training that was presented to them.

Each team will get a full SEC crew for one of their August scrimmages so they can simulate having those officials as they try to simulate game conditions.

That's it. I wish every one of you an enjoyable 2026 season, and perhaps I'll see some of you guys in Atlanta for the championship game. Thank you for your time this morning.