SUN SHINES ON TXST

Conference officials offer updates on rule changes coming this season

Anyone looking for major changes in college football rules for the 2023 season will be disappointed. For John McDaid, that’s a good thing.

But the Sun Belt Conference’s Coordinator of Football Officials did provide an update on the few rule adjustments in place for the upcoming season during Day 2 of Sun Belt Football Media Days on Wednesday, July 26, at the Sheraton New Orleans Hotel.

One change in particular will be readily apparent to college fan–and could result in game times being slightly shorter than last year’s average of three hours and 21 minutes across all of FBS football. Beginning this season, the clock will not stop when a team picks up a first down inbounds except in the final two minutes of each half.

“When I listen to the schools, the chancellors and presidents, the athletic directors, when I listen to the teams and our fans and our coaches, 3:21 a game’s not bad,” said Mc-Daid, whose data shows that FBS games have averaged between 3:16 and 3:24 over each of the past five years.

“What they’re concerned about, and what we’re concerned about, is the average number of plays in those games. Three hour and 45-minute games are what we don’t want.”

FBS games averaged 178.3 plays last year, the lowest in five years, but McDaid said that the difference over those years has been only four plays.

He expects the revised clock rules, each in place to increase player safety, will shorten games by only four or five plays per game.

The other new regulations that could affect game times this year are the prohibition of teams calling back-to-back timeouts in the same dead-ball situation–“You’re not going to ice the kicker with two timeouts anymore,” he said–and a change that will eliminate untimed downs due to penalties at the end of the first and third quarters.

Untimed downs in penalty situations at the end of each half will continue.

McDaid was almost relieved when the topic of targeting came up. A controversial rule change a few years ago, McDaid said that targeting calls were again reduced by a significant amount last season and were only a small part of the average 14.1 penalties called in FBS games.

“We had a 35% reduction in targeting per game across the FBS from 2020 to 2021, and a 25% reduction from 2021 to 2022,” he said. “Overall, there was a 68% reduction in targeting per game in just a two-year span.”

“You ask me what’s the explanation for that, to me it’s clearly the behavior of the athletes has changed. They understand what we don’t want in the game, and they’re doing the things to get the head and neck out of collisions in the game.”

McDaid spoke to the media on Wednesday, July 26, prior to the head coaches and student-athletes from the seven schools in the Sun Belt East Division–a division that is wide open in all of the preseason projections.

Five of the seven teams received at least one firstplace vote in the Sun Belt Conference Football Preseason Coaches Poll and the top four teams were separated by a total of only 10 points—James Madison with 78, App State with 75, Coastal Carolina with 71 and Marshall with 68.

“Our guys are used to being ranked No. 1,” said James Madison head coach Curt Cignetti. “We’ve won seven of the last eight conference championships over the last eight seasons (including previous leagues), we’re 48-3 at home over the last seven seasons. Now, we know that means nothing in the great scheme of things … at the end of the year, the team that plays best will be No. 1. But it is a sign of respect that we appreciate. Our guys are accustomed to winning, and if you win in a league like this it goes a long way.”

App State head coach Shawn Clark, whose team received just as many firstplace votes [four] as James Madison in the preseason poll, emphasized the overall depth of the league in both divisions.

“We played Louisiana four times in eight years,” said Clark, referencing those two teams meeting in each of the first three Sun Belt Football Championship Games from 2018-21.

“Those days are gone. There’s so much balance that anyone can win this league.”

The talk of increased balance continued the theme from the opening day of Sun Belt Football Media Days on Tuesday, when the league’s seven West Division teams were featured.

Those coaches were adamant about the Sun Belt’s status as the strongest league among the five non-autonomy conferences, and that didn’t change on Wednesday.

“This is the best Group of Five league out there, and I don’t think it’s even close,” said Old Dominion head coach Ricky Rahne, whose first-year league member squad knocked off Virginia Tech in its 2022 season opener and later had a stunning road win at Coastal Carolina when the Chanticleers were 3-0 in Sun Belt Conference play.

“I’ve known about the Sun Belt for a long time,” said Coastal Carolina head coach Tim Beck, one of two new head coaches in the conference along with Texas State’s G.J. Kinne.

Kinne and two of his team players, RS senior free safety Tory Spears and junior, Nash Jones, offensive line, traveled to New Orleans for the media days.

State of the Conference

And in case the message didn’t come through loud and clear during Day 1 on Tuesday, July 25, Sun Belt Conference Commissioner Keith Gill is bullish on his league.

And why not? Sun Belt football is at an all-time high after the 2022 season continued the league’s meteoric ascension among the FBS’ non-autonomy conferences over the past half-decade.

The league’s top three teams combined for 31 wins and a 31-9 record, reigning conference champion Troy enters the 2023 season with the nation’s second-longest winning streak behind national champion Georgia and those Trojans made last year’s final College Football Playoff rankings– the fourth year in a row that the Sun Belt has had a team in the CFP’s final listing.

“The Sun Belt is rising,” Gill told the assembled media and school staffers Tuesday at the Media Days headquarter Sheraton New Orleans Hotel. “As we celebrate football, it’s obvious that the Sun Belt Conference has never been better.”

The Sun Belt is in its second year with an expanded membership, one year after the league added James Madison, Marshall, Old Dominion and Southern Miss to its roster.

Two of those schools were among the league’s all-time record seven participants in Bowl Season at the end of the 2022 campaign.

'Last year we welcomed four new members into the Sun Belt, along with our members at the time expressing their 100 percent commitment to the conference,” Gill said. “We now have 14 schools in 10 contiguous states, and this commitment and these additions resulted in what may have been the best season in the history of Sun Belt football.”

The Sun Belt Conference is made up of 14 members: App State, Arkansas State, Coastal Carolina, Georgia Southern, Georgia State, James Madison, Louisiana, ULM, Marshall, Old Dominion, South Alabama, Southern Miss, Texas State and Troy.

“The carefully constructed design of the Sun Belt has paid dividends on the field and with college football fans,” Gill added, citing the fact that 35 million people watched Sun Belt football on television last year, almost a 100 percent increase over 2021.

That’s not just bragging or hyperbole, and it’s a lot more than just an increase in eyeballs watching the league on its long-time partner ESPN’s linear and streaming platforms.

“We’ve said it before and it’s the truth, we are the premier Group of Five conference in all of college football,” said second-year Troy head coach Jon Sumrall, whose Trojans (12-2 in 2022) were picked to repeat as Sun Belt West Division champions–albeit by a narrow margin over in-state rival South Alabama (10-3 in 2022).

“It’s not arguably any more, it’s factually, the best Group of Five conference in America,” said Arkansas State head coach Butch Jones, entering his third season with the Red Wolves.

He’s seen first-hand how good the Sun Belt has become, with the conference boasting multiple 10-win teams for five-straight seasons. Since 2020 only 10 FBS programs have won more than 75 percent of their games. Four of the nation’s conferences have two each out of those 10—the SEC, Big Ten, Big 12 and Sun Belt.

“In Week 1 and 2 last year, Old Dominion beat Virginia Tech, Marshall won on the road at Notre Dame, App State won at Texas A&M and Georgia Southern won at Nebraska,” Gill said. “The Sun Belt had a more than 50% increase in representation on All-America teams along with that record number of teams participating in postseason bowl games.”

Following Troy’s 45-26 win over Coastal Carolina in the Hercules Tires Sun Belt Football Championship Game–the home team is unbeaten in the five-year history of the league title game–three Sun Belt teams won bowl games. That included No. 24-ranked Troy, who beat Conference USA champion and No. 25-ranked UTSA 18-12 in the Duluth Trading Cure Bowl– last year’s only bowl game that featured two conference champions.

Only the SEC, ACC, Big Ten and Big 12 had more bowl participants than the Sun Belt.

The numbers helped the league maintain its spot as the most successful postseason league in the FBS since the dawn of the College Football Playoff in 2014, with a .614 bowl winning percentage.

Gill said the conference maintains its tie-ins with five bowl games–the R+L Carriers New Orleans Bowl (Dec. 16, New Orleans, La.), the 68 Ventures Bowl (Dec. 23, Mobile, Ala.), the Camellia Bowl (Dec. 23, Montgomery, Ala.), the Cure Bowl (Dec. 16, Orlando, Fla.) and the Myrtle Beach Bowl (Dec. 18, Conway, S.C.).

He added that the league is pursuing other bowl agreements.

“The CFP is our ultimate goal each year, but our conference bowl partners are key to our success as a football league,” he said. “We continue to explore options to expand our number of bowl partners to accommodate our rising success on the field.

We will look to add two to three primary bowls in the not-too-distant future and will continue to work with the NCAA to expand our opportunities to engage with primary bowl partners before the end of the current bowl cycle.”

The seven teams in the West Division were featured on Day 1 of Sun Belt Football Media Days on Tuesday.

The seven East Division teams took the stage on Wednesday with head coaches and two student- athletes from each school taking part.

Troy and South Alabama– which lost a tough 10-6 October contest to the Trojans that kept the Jaguars out of the title game–were picked first and second in the Sun Belt Conference Football Preseason Coaches Poll, but four-time West Division champion Louisiana and Southern Miss, which went from 3-9 to 7-6 last year and beat Rice in the Lending Tree Bowl, were not far behind.