This past weekend, we saw the two-minute warning debut in the college game, and the reactions have been mixed. While the two-minute warning has been part of the NFL game for some time, not every college football fan also loves the NFL or follows it close enough to notice the difference it makes.
The new timeout hasn’t been around long enough to know exactly how it will affect the game, but there are a few changes we can expect.
1. Extra Timeout/Victory Formation
The two-minute warning will give an additional timeout. This can be both a help and a hindrance at the end of the game or a half. If a team is out of timeouts or needs to get down the entire field at the end of the game, the two-minute warning will give the offense a needed break. On the flip side, if a defense is trying to get a stop, the two-minute warning can provide precious seconds late in the game when trying to get the ball back.
From some perspective, currently, if an offense has the ball and the defense has no timeouts, they can go into victory formation at about 2:15. Now, with the two-minute warning, a team will not be able to start kneeling the ball until after the two-minute warning. If a team starts before the two-minute warning, there would be at least 30 seconds left.
2. Momentum
Often, at the end of the game, a defense or offense begins to dominate on one side of the ball. The two-minute warning can be a momentum killer. This is seen all the time in basketball when a team is either going on a big offensive run or getting multiple stops, and then a timeout is called, and the momentum is stalled.
There will be games this year where an offense is driving, and the defense has no timeouts, perhaps on their heels, and then a two-minute warning will give the defense a break, and the pendulum of momentum will switch back the defense.
3. College Football is the King of Commercial Breaks
If you thought commercial breaks were bad before, this additional break will make the games last even longer. They could also be TV-rating killers. The time that a game is watched in the final two minutes of the first half is likely to plummet as well as the final two minutes if the game appears to be over or out of reach.
Also, it is ironic that the two-minute warnings are now lengthening the game when we, as fans, were told for years that certain rule changes, such as a change to the overtime, stopping the clock after first downs, or only stopping the clock out of bounds in the last two minutes were to shorten the game?
I guess the dollar can overrule any past decisions or logic.
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