Thank you Rece Davis. Thank you! (HUNH Offenses)

Bamabuzzard said:

I'm not sure if anyone caught CFB Daily yesterday on ESPN U but it was the segment where Danny Kanell, Rece Davis and Butch Davis were at Auburn discussing their upcoming season. The last part of the segment was the discussion about the HUNH offenses and the arguments from both sides of the isle. After the two other nimrods put their .02 in Rece finally said what I've yet to hear any person on air say. He said (and I'll give a summary rather than quote):

Let's be honest. Parties on both sides this argument aren't some sort of benevolent party truly concerned about the greater good of the game. Both sides are trying to gain an advantage and I believe the HUNH offenses have done that. My only issue with the HUNH has nothing to do with the teams or the coaches who run them. But with the officials. Too many times the officials are assisting the offense to help them run their pace of offense. We've sat in the studio watching games and time and time again offensive violations are missed due to this. I wish they would adopt the attitude of the NFL in that they don't care what pace you run your offense, but the officials aren't going to run at that pace. I think that needs to be a point of emphasis in college. Because too many things are being missed by the officials that are benefiting the HUNH offenses.

I stood up from my recliner and yelled "PRAISE THE LORD!!! THANK YOU RECE DAVIS!!!".

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JBama_in_PCOLA said:

That's the true point to all of this. The refs are never set!

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92tide said:

neither is the offense

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centerstar said:

That Rece Davis is highly intelligent. Where did he go to school?

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fralo4tide said:

Dude, he used the word benevolent! I'm 38, and I don't think I've ever used that word. :smile:

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fralo4tide said:

How could the HUNH coaches respond to this particular argument? I mean, if there are documented facts of missed calls by the refs...

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GrayTide said:

Good read, buzz and spot on. The officials need to meet with both coaching staffs before the game and let them know in no uncertain terms that they (the officials) will control the pace of play and if any coach starts to harass any official on the field he will be subject to a 15 yard penalty and if further outbursts occur that coach will be ejected from the game and field of play.

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RTR91 said:

Steve Shaw, the head of SEC officiating, discussed this during Media Days. Go to the 17:00 mark.

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Bruce014 said:

I cannot watch the video. Would someone be willing to summarize what Shaw said? Are SEC officials going to actually do anything about this?

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As we continue to work replay, we're going to continue to have subtle changes there. Now, there's some other changes. We won't hit all of these. But I want to talk about a couple of these.

The first one bullet is we're expanding the experiment of using the eighth official. I want to talk about not only what we're going to do in the SEC, but I want to talk about the eighth official and why it's there because I think there's this misconception we're adding an eighth official to go faster and faster and faster.

In the SEC, we are selecting one of our crews, they're going to work with the eighth official all year. When we met with the ADs, they want to ensure that this official saw every crew all year so we could have good feedback on it to see if this is a direction we ultimately want to go. The intent of the eighth official is not to go faster, not to go slower, but to help our guys officiate the game better.

I'll make two observations. First is now the game is changed with spread offenses. You can have up to five receivers in a route and many times we get that. If you think about our officials, we have three deep, two wing officials, all have keys on these receivers. If they go out, they're occupied with their key, that leaves the referee and umpire to handle all the other stuff in the middle. That's a tall order.

On top of that, what you see is a lot of times now with our up‑tempo teams, the umpire and the wing officials are not able to get their presnap routine. Our umpire is to count the offense, recognize the offensive formation, and then pick his keys from that offensive line and anticipate what's getting ready to happen.

Now a lot of times when we have substitutions, the umpire is having to stay at the ball, he can't do his presnap routine. So the eighth official is to help us officiate better.

I would tell you from a pace perspective, I'm going to talk about that in a few minutes, but my expectation is our crew of eight will go no faster and no slower. We've got to be consistent across all of our crews on pace of the game. So that's really the intent.

We had just a quick snippet that kind of illustrates the presnap routine. Here is a play where we're going up‑tempo. The umpire is having to stay, check off. Right there at snap‑‑ even our line judge has got the spot on the ball now, he's flipping the ball off, right at snap I have one official with his back turned, he's going to turn around, the snap. This is where our eighth official is going to help him. We'll call him the center judge.

The center judge will spot the ball on every play and will interact with the referee on substitutions. That's going to free up our umpire and our wing guys to go do their presnap routine. We worked this in a lot of spring games.

I'm encouraged that it's really helpful to us. That's the intent. It's not to go faster, not to go slower. It's a consistent pace, but to get our officials ready to officiate the play.

Now, I mentioned earlier the expanded use of crew communication system. That has been a great tool to help us not only communicate with the crew better, get better information to the coaches quicker, and ultimately make us better officials. So that's going to continue and, as I said, nationally expand. You may not notice this, but this is one of the things the coaches really wanted.

So what we're going to do, we're actually going to take in the first half, our line judge and field judge, will be opposite the press box with the chains. At halftime, they're going to switch sidelines and the head linesman side judge will work the chains in the second half.

So that's something you may notice that's a little different mechanic that we're going to do this year. We'll see the results of that. I think everybody is behind that and thinks that will be a good change.

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Now, let me briefly hit the national points of emphasis. These around just SEC points of emphasis, but national points of emphasis. We had discussion about pace of play in our off‑season. That is a national point of emphasis from a couple perspectives.

Number one is nationally we have to be very consistent. The coordinators have met. We've talked. We've actually built our mechanics, and we have specific words, specific ways that we're going to handle pace of play based on the current rule.

I want to talk about that. But let me kind of get off to the side. I mean, clearly there needs to be healthy debate around this topic and other topics in our game. The commissioner even has suggested that maybe we look at a football Competition Committee to look at this issue and other issues to see what is in the long‑term best interests of the game. I support that completely.

We're getting ready for the 2014 season. What's the rule today and how are we going to manage that consistently?

The rule today says when the ball is ready, the offense can snap it. So here is what we're telling nationally to all our officials. Whether it's the center judge spotting the ball or it's the umpire, the umpire, if we don't have a crew of eight. What we're saying is when the play is dead, the umpire or the person spotting the ball, you will not walk and you will not sprint. We're calling it a 'crisp jog.' We're trying to get all of our umpires on the same page on a crisp jog.

We won't just throw the ball down, we'll get a spot. We'll check the referee, if there's substitutions, we'll hold the ball. No substitutions, he'll release them, release the ball, then the offense can snap it.

I think what you're going to see is very consistent work nationally. I know there's athleticism differences sometimes between umpires. But we're really working for them all to do it the same way.

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