Punt formations don't usually get college coaches fired up, but the NCAA's tinkering with a rule back in the spring did exactly that, and first-year Michigan State special teams coordinator LeVar Woods (who spent 14 of his last 18 seasons at Iowa years coordinating some of the best units in the country) used his time at the podium Monday to lay out just how much the coaching world thinks the whoever pushed this rule change through got it wrong and there's going to be some unintended consequences that weren't fully thought through.
Back in March, the NCAA adopted a rule that restricts how teams can line up to punt. The way it's being interpreted, teams either line up in a 2x2 formation, a guard and tackle on each side of the center wearing ineligible numbers, or, if they don't, they have to put five ineligible numbers on the punt unit. The stated goal was to make it easier for defenses to identify eligible receivers on fakes. If you like a well-designed fake punt, you're going to like this a lot less.
Woods, who spent 18 years at Iowa under Kirk Ferentz and ran the Hawkeyes' special teams for his last 14 seasons before Pat Fitzgerald brought him to East Lansing this January, is the guy whose job this rule hits hardest. His biggest issue is how it got on the books in the first place.
"Very unhappy with how it came about, the rule change, who was consulted, who wasn't consulted," Woods said. "Coaches weren't consulted and they tried to ram this thing through in the cloak of darkness in the middle of, you know, like late February, early March. People were on spring break, people were getting going their spring practice. A lot of guys, a lot of coaches, head coaches and coordinators had no idea."
Woods said his staff spent April fielding calls from coordinators and head coaches around the country asking him to explain a rule they had just stumbled onto. There were at least a few Power Four coordinators he talked to that had no clue it even existed. He mentioned reaching a coordinator at Army who was heading into spring break, most of the way through their spring practices, and when talking about the punt formation rule changes he asked, "What are you talking about?"
No special teams coach wants to be handcuffed into a single 2x2 look, as Woods calls it. Woods says a lot of them are keeping their formation flexibility by changing jerseys instead - and there's a really good chance the NCAA never considered coaches would do that.
"There's going to be like hockey line changes with changing jerseys," Woods said. Jordan Hall wears No. 5. Nakai Martinez wears No. 21. On a punt, Woods says, they might run out in the 70s to carry an ineligible number, cover the kick, and come off. "Those are just two guys on this team. Now multiply that by 130," and imagine how big of a headache that is going to be for the play-by-play announcers and analysts covering the game.
That's where Woods dug into the piece he says nobody weighed. NIL is now tied to the number on a player's back. Jordan Hall, he said, has a deal in town built around No. 5, and now Hall might be wearing 70, 75 or 77 on any given punt. The stadium PA announcer has to sort out who made the tackle when two different players are wearing 70. NFL scouts sitting in the building cutting up tape have to track a corner who is No. 3 one snap and No. 78 the next.
There'a widespread consensus among coaches that the NCAA created nightmare of a rule change that very, very few coaches are in favor of, and somewhere "ramrodded it through under a cloak of darkness," as Woods shares.
Woods goes on to point the rest of the NCAA's rule slate to further make his point. Targeting changes went through. The punt rule went through. A proposal on pants that were too short did not. When he asked people on the oversight committee why the pants rule died, the answer he got back was uniform contracts, money, and the belief that players would revolt. His question is why the same NIL and uniform logic didn't apply to punts.
The process complaint runs through all of it. Woods said the stated reason for the change kept moving. On a Zoom that included national officiating coordinator Steve Shaw and Big Ten officiating coordinator Bill Carollo, coaches were first told it was to make the play easier to coach. Nobody in the room was asking for that. Then it shifted to making the play easier to officiate, which Woods says any official will tell you is backwards when you now need two or three sets of rules for different situations.
He's not alone in the pushback. Woods said the Big Ten was unanimous against the rule, a couple of other Power Four leagues were overwhelmingly opposed, and one conference split mostly because he doesn't think the coaches fully understood it.
"This is really just ramrodded through," Woods said. "I still think there's time to reverse this and time to really think about it and get it right and put a committee together."
He also knows how this usually goes. Everybody is practicing under the new rule right now, and once a season starts under a rule, it has a tendency to stay. So while Woods believes it would be easy to revert, his honest read certainly seems that everyone should prepare themselves for how special teams coordinators are adjusting to the new rule for this fall.
Stay tuned to The Scoop for the latest.