By Rogers Redding (Periodically, Rogers Redding, the national coordinator of College Football Officiating, will provide insights about rules changes and the mindset of college football referees. The CFO is the national professional organization for all football officials who work games at the collegiate level.)

An important new rule in college football for 2011 is the 10-second runoff. This is a special rule designed to prevent a team from gaining a clock advantage by committing a foul near the end of a half.

Here is how it works. Suppose the game clock is running when either team commits a foul that causes the clock to stop with less than one minute in the half. Part of the penalty is to take 10 seconds off the clock, at the option of the offended team. They may want to accept the yardage penalty and decline the 10-second runoff, and that is allowed. If the yardage penalty is declined or if there are offsetting fouls then there is no 10-second runoff. Also, if the team that commits the foul has any timeouts left they can avoid the 10-second runoff by burning a timeout.

Here’s an example. With the clock running inside the last minute of the game, the offense is about to snap the ball when one of its linemen jumps: false start, which stops the clock. Suppose it shows 45 seconds left.  If the defense chooses, 10 seconds will be taken off the clock (in addition to the five-yard penalty), so the ball would be made ready for play with 35 seconds left and the clock would start on the referee’s signal.

Note that if there had been fewer than 10 seconds left when the clock stopped then the game would be over.

Not all fouls include the runoff of time—only those that actually cause the clock to stop immediately. For example, if a team snaps the ball from an illegal formation, there would be no option to take time from the clock, because the play continues. The clock stops at the end of the down only for administering the penalty.