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SOUTHEASTERN CONFERENCE MEDIA DAYSJuly 23, 2009Rogers ReddingHOOVER, ALABAMA CHARLES BLOOM: Good morning, welcome to 2009 SEC Football Media Days, day two. We appreciate you coming to this event each year. We appreciate having you here. We're going to start off this morning with Rogers Redding, our coordinator of football officials. Rogers. ROGERS REDDING: Good morning. It's great to see everyone again. Always enjoy Media Days. It signals the kickoff of the football season, for the officials as well as for the teams and the coaches. The officials are excited about the season. They're doing their prep right now. There's been a lot of study groups meeting during the off-season, physical assessment, physical conditioning, so we're ready to go just like the coaches and the players are. The SEC officiating continues to expand in terms of its leadership role at the national level. We continue to have the maximum number of crews working Bowl games and those kinds of indicators of progress. In terms of the rules committee action for this year, I've been involved in football officiating in one way or another for about 35 years, more than 35 years. This has got to be the smallest number of rules changes I have ever seen. There's really hardly anything to talk about. There is some things and I'll point them out to you. I will point out that the rules committee made no changes in the clock rule this year. I think we can all be grateful for that. The rules committee has experimented with a variety of clock rules over the past several years. You may recall that two years ago, there was quite a brouhaha about when the clock started, all that. That seems to have settled down pretty well. I think there's general consensus that we're pretty much where we need to be as far as the clock is concerned. So the rules committee really didn't even talk about the clock this year. I should also point out that because of the fact that the rules committee is made up of coaches, the only voting members on the committee are coaches equally divided from Divisions I, II, and III. They try to manage the game from a BCS Division I level, but the standpoint of Divisions II and III, as well. Safety and unsportsmanlike conduct continue to be an important emphasis for the rules committee and commissioners. The rules committee didn't make any changes this year in those rules, but did emphasize the need for conferences to perhaps view video following the games where if, much like the NFL does in imposing fines on players, for particularly violent acts of safety-related blows, neck and head area, for possible additional sanctions. There's one rather technical change that you may hear something about. I should explain it to you, has to do with the offensive formation. For a very long time, as long as anybody can remember, the offense has been required to have at least seven players on the line of scrimmage. They could have more than that, but they had to have at least seven players on the line of scrimmage. Now the rule reads -- it's the same rule, but reads slightly differently. It says the offense may have no more than four in the backfield. It's easier to officiate and it also gets rid of sort of a ticky-tacky rule or penalty. We had this a couple times last year in our league. The offense inadvertently winds up with only 10 players on the field. There's not a rule against 10 players on the field, but it's penalty enough to play short one man. If they had six players on the line and four players in the backfield, that was an illegal formation because they did not have the required seven on the line. So this year, with no more than four in the backfield, then that penalty would go away. That's not the reason for the change. That's sort of a positive unintended consequence of that change. The real change in the rules has to do with the punting game, kicking game. Of concern to special teams coaches over the past several years has been the rugby-style kick where the punter back in punt formation takes the ball and starts running with it, and he executes a rugby-style kick or becomes a runner. From a defensive standpoint, it was difficult to tell, is this guy going to be a runner, are we at risk if we run into him? There's some advantages to the kicking team. It gives the gunners more time to get down field because he's taking more time before he kicks the ball. It's also more likely to be a line-drive-type kick than a nice, high, hang-time spiral. From a competitive balance standpoint, the rules committee made the following change: if the punter carries the ball outside the tackle box -- the tackle box is defined as five yards on each side of the snapper going back from the line of scrimmage. If the punter carries the ball outside the tackle box before he kicks the ball, then there will be no roughing the kicker or running into the kicker if he gets hit. So the defensive team doesn't have to decide if he is going to be a runner or not. They're not at risk for getting a roughing-the-kicker foul if he carries the ball outside the tackle box before he kicks it. He's still protected from flagrant slugging and some kind of dangerous unsportsmanlike conduct, unnecessary roughness foul, but the special protection that a kicker has when he's in punt formation and kicks the ball from deep punt formation, he loses that protection when he runs outside the tackle box. The only thing to say with the rules process is that, much like most of the rest of the NCAA rules committee, the football rules committee now is going to a two-year rules change process. If you get a copy of the new rule book, it has 2009/2010, so that there will not be any rule changes in 2010. Not only are there fewer rule changes this year than ever before, there aren't going to be any more until 2011. We're going to have at least two years to play the game under circumstances we've been used to for some time. The rules committee, we've talked about the possibilities for this off-year meeting. I think what the rules committee would like to do is to meet, without being under pressure to make changes, talk about the game. Is the game where the coaches want it to be? Is the game where it needs to be in terms of the overall rules picture? They'll be able to talk about long-term trends and not feel any kind of pressure to make rule changes in the bye year. 2009/10 will be the current rule book. 2011, there will be another potential set of changes to make in the rules. So, as I say, very simple this year. Nothing complicated at all. We're all looking forward to getting the season started and playing under a set of rules that we've become accustomed to and look forward to not many changes this year at all, and none next year. THE MODERATOR: Rogers, thank you. End of FastScripts |
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