Reviewing College Football’s New Rules for 2025

The NCAA has a new slate of rules for 2025. I am going to summarize what these rules mean for the game and then give them a rating between 1 and 5 where 1 will be awful for the game and a 5 should be an amazing addition. ESPN published an article reviewing these new rules, which can be found here. Mr. FishDuck took a break from his gaming fun at Tongits to chime in with me on some of these rule changes that he agrees with.

Fake Injuries

Let’s start with the big one right away. Starting next year if a player goes down for medical attention after the ball is spotted by the officiating crew, that team will be forced to use one of its timeouts. If they do not have any time outs, they will be forced to take a five-yard penalty, effectively taking a delay of game penalty.

This rule is designed to keep games moving and, in truth, it probably won’t come into play too often. Injured players tend to be down on the field before the officials can spot the ball, and it won’t affect the current state of the game in how the vast majority of injuries are treated.

However, the implementation of this rule isn’t a good look for a sport that already has a problem with safety. Even though most injured players won’t get caught up in this rule, it still has a chance of impacting the game for injured players. We’ve all seen instances where an offensive or defensive player bounces back up after a play, takes a few steps and then goes down with a real injury. Adrenaline can do some amazing things and masking an injury is one of them — and it can take a minute for the brain to catch up to the body.

Players are taught if they are injured they need to just go down on the field, which signals medical staff to come to them. This is the way it should be done, as injured players shouldn’t be moved until they’ve been medically assessed to avoid further risk of injury. What this new rule does is encourage this small percentage of players who may have suffered a delayed injury to try to get themselves off the field before the snap to avoid hurting their team down the stretch of a close game.

This rule does address an important issue of fake injuries that can slow down the game and take away momentum from one team over the other. Fake injuries have been deployed by both sides of the ball, though it is more often the defense. But is this the look the NCAA wants to put out there — that they are putting the pacing of the game ahead of player safety?

There are other ways to implement the punishment for this penalty, such as having third-party medical officials give their opinions on the legitimacy of the injuries. Then put that penalty onto the player and force the player to sit out the entire drive, or maybe the next drive as well. It still hurts the team but it doesn’t discount a player who may be experiencing a delayed injury.

Rule Rating: 2 – The rule is fine but the penalty should be implemented differently to ensure player safety.

Referee Call Changes

Next rule up, referees will only have two responses from which to choose when judging the result of a video review. They will now only be able to say “upheld” or “overturned.” From a game flow standpoint this cleans up a lot in the officiating role.

The old system would have three calls: “confirmed” meant the review found concrete evidence for their call, “stands” meant there was no concrete evidence to confirm or overturn the call so the original ruling held up, and finally “overturned” meant there was replay evidence that changed the ruling on the field. Having a discrepancy between “confirmed” and “stands” didn’t change the outcome of the ruling, but it did cast a shadow of a doubt over any ruling that received the lesser standard of “stands.”

Rule Rating: 4 – Doesn’t change the game but will improve pacing.

Kickoff Signaling

This new rule is simple, if any player makes a “T” sign with his arms during a kick return, the ball is whistled dead and there is no return.

Clear signs are great for the game and on kick returns it is critical to have strong signs, as defensive players are running down the field at full speed. This is an additional signal to the universal sign of a kick returner taking a knee as any player makes the sign the return is over. This helps ensure player safety, as defensive players can see this sign and pull up.

Kick returns get tricky when a returner wants to be sneaky and pretend not to go for a return, and then instead makes a run for it — leaving defensive players to make a difficult decision. Do they chase the player down because it’s a live play and risk incurring a penalty, or do they give up on the play believing it’s dead and give up a big play? Better signals make the game safer and fairer.

Rule Ruling: 5 – This rule is good for players and the game.

Defensive Pre-Snap Communication

Defensive players have been needlessly penalized over the past couple years for giving “confusing signals” to the opposing offense. This comes when a defensive player calls out “move” or “stem” and the defensive front quickly shifts their alignment. This has, at times, caused the offensive line to falsely start, as players react to the defensive movement. However, this is perfectly legal. Where the offense is not allowed to move before the snap, the defense can move however they want, as long as they don’t cross the line of scrimmage.

Officials have gotten this rule wrong so many times over the years it has been frustrating and confusing for announcers and fans alike. When Oregon played Wisconsin this last year the officiating crew called both the Duck defense and Badger defense, wrongly, on their defensive movements.

This new rule will make “move” and “stem” defense-only words and it would be an offensive violation if they use words like that to draw the defense into a penalty. This cleans up communication and makes the rules clearer for the game on the whole.

Rule Ruling: 5 – This shouldn’t have needed to happen, but it’s good that it did.

Helmet Communications for FCS Teams

Starting this year FCS teams can also have helmet comms like in the FBS. I’ll make this one quick. This is fine and completely unexciting, unless you’re a die-hard FCS fan who railed against not getting it last year.

Rule Ruling: 3 – This is fine.

So there we have it; those are most of the new rules for the NCAA 2025 football season. There are, however, two rules I have not addressed in this article and they’ll be featured in a future FishDuck article. On the whole, this batch of rules probably won’t impact the game all that much, especially compared to last year’s rule addition of the two-minute timeout and the first introduction of player-coach communications. These should mostly go unnoticed — probably the best kind of addition — but what do you think?

David Marsh
Portland, Oregon
Top Photo By Steven Chan

 

Natalie Liebhaber, the FishDuck.com Volunteer Editor for this article, works in technology in SLC, Utah.

 

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