108: Pace of play, plus bikeshedding
Seconds per play data, bikeshedding and realignment, plus some random recommendations.
Helmet communication is available to the 134 FBS teams for the first time this season.
One player on offense and one player on defense can listen in for a play call or directions from a coach. The communication is turned off with 15 seconds remaining on the play clock or when the ball is snapped.
Do you think we’ve seen any pace of play changes with this new rule?
The sample size is quite small or only about four weeks worth of data. And this sample size has yielded some interesting results.
TeamRankings measures pace by seconds per play on offense. The data shows an average of 26.1 seconds through the first four weeks of last season compared to 26.9 seconds through the first four weeks of this season. The average seconds per play through the first four weeks of 2022 was 25.5 seconds.
The average pace is about one second slower per play than last season. This has shown up in possession data in individual games this season. For example, Florida Atlantic only had two drives in the second half in a 24-7 loss to Army.
If the pace is slower on average, which teams are playing faster or slower compared to last season?
The table below shows the ten teams with biggest changes in pace of play using seconds per play on offense from TeamRankings1.
Under new head coach Jeff Lebby, Mississippi State is playing about seven seconds per play faster than last season. The speed hasn’t brought results as the Bulldogs lost by 24 points at home against Toledo this past weekend.
Pittsburgh is playing about six seconds per play faster under Pat Narduzzi from a season ago. The Panthers are 3-0 after putting together a pair of come-from-behind wins. Those comebacks might not be possible if Pitt played as slow as they have in previous seasons.
On the opposite end of the spectrum, UCLA is playing about seven seconds slower per play under Deshaun Foster and without Chip Kelly as its head coach. The Bruins’ pace might be better suited for the Big Ten, but Indiana smacked UCLA 42-13 over the weekend, so maybe not?
North Carolina is playing about five seconds slower per play without Drake Maye. The Heels have played three quarterbacks through three games so far. The lack of stability in the passing game has UNC playing slower than ever under Mack Brown 2.0.
The sample sizes are still too small for any certainty in pace of play, however, it’s something to monitor as competition ramps up this season.
A tiny app for you to check out
Over the past couple weeks, I built a tiny app to surface college football data: byc.evidence.app
Data is from cfbfastR, bcftoys.com, and ESPN.com. The app includes:
team ratings from FPI and F+
conference standings and point differentials
FBS vs FBS head-to-head conference records
point spreads and totals
All data is cleaned and transformed using the R programming language. This site is built using evidence.dev and duckdb.
Bikeshedding
Over the weekend, Washington and Washington State played the Apple Cup at a neutral site. It was a non-conference game.
Oregon State hosted Oregon in a non-conference game. Kansas State and Arizona are both part of the Big 12, but its contest last Friday was a non-conference game.
Indiana and UCLA squared off last Saturday in the Big Ten.
Oh, and last week, the Pac-12 announced2 its adding Boise State, Colorado State, Fresno State, and San Diego State prior to the 2026-27 academic year.
Now people are speculating other teams that might join the Pac-12 to round out of the conference. This is all part of a wild realignment period in which 33 FBS teams have changed conferences over the last three years.
33 teams. That’s ~25 percent of all FBS teams.
Bikeshedding is a term used to describe Parkinson’s law of triviality. The law states people give disproportionate weight to trivial issues while leaving important matters unattended.
The term comes from this example3:
A committee deliberates about an atomic reactor and a bicycle shed. A reactor is so vastly expensive and complicated that an average person cannot understand it, so one assumes that those who work on it understand it.
However, everyone can visualize a cheap, simple bicycle shed, so planning one can result in endless discussions because everyone involved wants to implement their own opinion.
Conference realignment, and college sports in general, reminds me of bikeshedding. Everyone can imagine their team in a different conference, and we all want to endlessly discuss the next move or the right move or how one conference is overrated or underrated.
Of course, the changing of a conference is not trivial. This is a big business and there are lots of people’s livelihoods that depend on it.
But my assumption is part of the reason we’ve arrived at this current state of college athletics is because of focusing on the wrong issues. The NCAA operated with a mafia budget for decades, and rather that focusing on difficult issues like trying to redistribute the wealth, there is no sound plan.
Anyhow.
Random recommendations
Here are a few recommendations from sites I’ve found helpful as of late:
evidence.dev: obvious first recommendation after using it over the past couple weeks to build this app. Evidence is an open-source, lightweight framework for building data apps. It’s dead simple to get started. I’m still learning how to best organize it, but really digging it so far.
gtUtils: this is a new R package from Andrew Weatherman. The table in this post is built using gtUtils many useful functions. Andrew consistently puts out useful tools and makes it easier for other to make things that look good.
gameonpaper.com: built by Akshay Easwaran, Saiem Gilani, and others, this site is now something I frequent way too often on Saturdays. The live box scores are dynamite, and now they’ve added team and player leaderboards too.
Thanks for reading this far, and please check out this tiny app and let me know what you think. It’s meant to complement this newsletter.
Plan to add more college football data to it in the future, and likely use it for the college basketball season too.
As always, subscribe for free if you so choose:
A disclaimer is this compares a smaller sample size in 2024 to the entire 2023 season.
Pac-2? Pac-12? Pac-6? Maybe we should just drop numbers from conference names altogether.
This is paraphrased from Wikipedia. This article includes more details too. This is a half-baked idea, but the realignment stuff remains exhausting.