Making Sense of NCAA Rule Changes

Courtney Sulfaro — September 8, 2021

In late July, the NCAA Playing Rules Oversight Panel got the lacrosse community talking when they announced rule changes in the women’s game.

The desired result of the new rules is to make lacrosse more efficient, while “shortening the duration of the game without taking away the 60 minutes on the game clock,” according to an NCAA statement.

Summary of significant changes:

• In most foul scenarios, the game clock will continue running, except for fouls committed inside the 8M arc, and alternate possession
• If offense retains possession of the ball following a goalie save or shot off the pipe and the shot clock is under 59 seconds, it will reset to 60 seconds
• The game will be played in four 15-minute quarters  
• Coaches will no longer be able to request stick checks during their team’s timeout

Why does the rule committee keep changing the women’s game in the name of “efficiency” while the men’s game remains virtually unchanged?

Twitter User

It is a fair question, and one that requires many numbers to try and get to the bottom of.

The first thing we evaluated was the average duration of games, as reported by the home team, in the two most competitive conferences in the country, the ACC and the Big 10. Of data obtained from 404 games between the conferences in 2021, the length was recorded for 368 of them. 

POINT 1

A glance at the difference in average game duration within these two conferences is not as great as it may seem.

The Big 10 men clocked in at an average of 2 hours and 15 seconds, while the women yielded 2 hours, 7 minutes, and 37 seconds. This shows the women’s game being just over 7 minutes longer in the conference.

However, the ACC tells a different story. There, the women’s average duration sat at 2 hours, 5 minutes, and 49 seconds, whereas the men saw their number just 8 seconds longer at 2 hours, 5 minutes, and 57 seconds.

POINT 2

The game duration at face value does not tell the whole story, given the broadcasting disparity between men’s and women’s lacrosse.

Combined, ESPN broadcasted nearly 33% of men’s games in this data set on television. Compare that with slightly more than 6% of women’s games, and you’ve got yourself a lot more commercial breaks in the men’s game. 

As expected, the average televised game was longer than streamed games. In streamed cases, the ACC men’s games were over eight minutes shorter, and the Big 10 men’s contests were nearly 17 minutes shorter.

If we removed the televised games from the data, women’s contests end up being nine minutes longer in the Big 10 while a minute and a half longer in the ACC.

In the future, something to watch for is if and/or how moving from halves to quarters impacts length of games on the women’s side.

POINT 3

Efficiency is not just about time. There are many factors. Two other elements to evaluate are the biggest clock stoppers, goals and fouls.

In the ACC, the total goals scored per game, combined goals for and against, was about 25.67 in the men’s game and 24.57 in the women’s.

With the clock stopping after each goal, unless a team is up by ten or more, a one-goal difference per game should not make a huge difference; that’s where fouls come in. 

ACC men’s teams committed an average of 3.89 penalties per game. The women, however, totaled a 21.5 foul average per contest.

On the Big 10 side, the men’s games saw about 24.72 goals in each game while the women averaged 25.92. Fouls seem to be the tale of the tape in this conference, too.

Big 10 men’s teams garnered a low number of 2.67 penalties per game. The women saw 22.28 fouls.

With women wearing less protective equipment than the men, officials call more fouls on the women’s side.

It remains to be seen how much the new rules will reduce the amount of time that fouls currently take up during the course of a game.

The NCAA may have a valid point in making these rule changes for the women’s game, or they may not. Fans are going to have to wait for the 2022 season to find out.