College football tempo: A Quick Look at Pace of Play through Week 3

I’ve been doing some work on the topic du jour in college football, namely the generally increased pace of play that is stemming from wider adoption of the Hurry-Up, No Huddle (HUNH) philosophy. As you may have heard, not everybody is enamored with this new dynamic in the game. But despite resistance from some traditionalist quarters, there is little doubt that the HUNH is changing the pace of the game overall.

Once (like, way back in 2010) an oddity that was only used by a few renegade coaches at the FBS level, there are now multiple programs in all conferences that have more or less adopted the HUNH as a full time modus operendi.  I don't have an exact count of how many teams are running a true HUNH right now, but a quick look at the national numbers should give readers a pretty good idea.

I really would like to be able to show you a graph that shows the national average and median pace of play over the last several years. I hope to be able to do that soon, but it requires more number crunching than I have managed to do so far. In the interim, I wanted to share some data showing who is playing fast, who isn't, and how fast fast is.

The methodology I have used for quantifying pace is pretty simple: I take time of possession (TOP) in seconds and divide by number of offensive plays run, in order to calculate seconds of clock time elapsed for each play. None of these numbers has been adjusted to take into account differences in run-pass mix, which definitely have an impact on pace of play. Clearly teams that pass a lot will tend to be able to fit more plays into a given TOP by virtue of the clock stoppages on incomplete passes.

I should also add that no attempt has been made to make any adjustments for game context. As is customary during the first several weeks of the season there have been quite a few very lopsided contests and those types of games may lead teams, that would otherwise be playing faster, to milk the clock a bit...either out of a sense of mercy or for simple self-preservation purposes.

Conferences

Before I show the full rankings for all 125 FBS teams, let's look at the breakdown by conferences.

The chart above is sorted by the median Seconds/Play. I also presented the average and a representative number of plays per game based on the median Seconds/Play multiplied by an average 30 minutes time of possession.

Despite what teams like Indiana, Texas A&M and Ole Miss are doing, the old school (some might say plodding) pace of yesteryear is still alive and well in both the Big Ten and the SEC. Nick Saban, Jerry Kill, Bret Bielema and Will Muschamp are certainly all doing their part to defend old-timey orthodoxy when it comes to pace of play.

On the opposite end of the spectrum, out West the pace of play is FAST, even if the pace of life isn't. The MWC and Pac-12 are basically tied at the top of the speed chart, narrowly nudging out traditional (if the last 5 years can be counted as "tradition") speed king the Big XII. It is also worth noting that the team currently playing the fastest in all of FBS (BYU) is physically located in the Western US, but isn't in a conference.

Teams

As I mentioned earlier it is clearly very early in the season and lots of things can change, but here are the way all of the FBS teams stack up right now: