From The Macon Telegraph, June 3, 2004:
Notebook: UGA’s Richt rebuffed in no-huddle bid
Georgia football coach Mark Richt continued the two-year fight for his no-huddle offense this week at the SEC Meetings.
“He and I talked about it for the last three hours,” Bobby Gaston, the league’s director of officials, said Friday afternoon on the second day of the meetings at the Sandestin Hilton.
Since coming to Georgia, Richt has all but ditched the fast break offense he made famous at Florida State because, he says, the league’s officials don’t allow him to go fast enough to make it worthwhile. SEC officials are required to pause for 12-14 seconds between each play, and that’s not going to change despite Richt’s arguments, Gaston said.
“He doesn’t agree with it, but he knows what we’re doing,” Gaston said.
The mandatory pause is to allow the officiating crew to get in position, Gaston said. Richt argued that the officials should put the ball in play as soon as they are set, regardless of how much time has elapsed, but Gaston said that would provide the offense an unfair advantage.
“Mark Richt would eat their lunch,” he said. “He would go straight to the ball and snap it. He’d get in 100 plays. We have about half the coaches who think we go too fast and about half who think we go too slow so we must be in about the right spot.”
From the Associated Press, today:
KNOXVILLE, Tenn. — Starting spring practice several weeks earlier than usual, Tennessee rolled out a new wrinkle for its offense Thursday.
Coach Phillip Fulmer said the Vols will experiment with a no-huddle offense this spring, hoping to take advantage of the experience of quarterback Erik Ainge, who will be a senior in the fall…
“It’s an attempt to see where we are with it, and it would be basically how we would manage the offense,” Fulmer said. “We’re going to take our shots at seeing what we can do with it as an offense…”
From the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, February 15, 2007:
The rules committee also announced that starting in 2008, college football will go to a 40-second play clock like that now used in the NFL. The 40-second clock will start at the end of every play. College football currently uses a 25-second clock that doesn’t start until the ball is put in position and declared ready for play. [Emphasis added.]
Is Richt about to get the chance to run the no-huddle the way he’s wanted to? (No cracks about first having to have receivers that can catch, please.)
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