Is There a Mercy Rule in College Football? No, There Isn’t
There is no mercy rule in NCAA college football. No margin ends a game or starts a running clock, but coaches and the referee can agree to shorten quarters.
By CricketTaken EditorialPublished College Football24 min read
- Margin that ends an NCAA game
- None
- Rule allowing shorter quarters
- NCAA Rule 3-2-2
- Largest margin on record
- 222-0 in 1916
- Six-man margin that ends a game
- 45 points
Georgia led Tennessee Tech 45-0 after three quarters in Athens on September 7, 2024, and the fourth quarter that followed was 10 minutes long. No flag was thrown and no threshold was crossed. The two head coaches had agreed to it, the referee had agreed with them, and the clock operator took five minutes off before the period began.
That is as close as the sport comes. NCAA football has no automatic mercy rule: no point margin ends a college game, and none starts a running clock. What the rulebook offers instead is a single sentence in Rule 3 that lets the opposing head coaches and the referee shorten whatever is left by mutual consent. If any one of the three says no, the game goes the full 60 minutes, at 45-0 or at 80-0.
No point margin ends an NCAA football game
The National Collegiate Athletic Association writes one football rulebook for all three of its divisions, and the timing rules in it never mention the score. Rule 3 sets four 15-minute periods and tells the officials when to stop and start the clock. A team leading by 60 at halftime kicks off to open the third quarter under exactly the same timing as a team leading by three.
Readers arrive at the question from two directions. Some grew up playing or watching high school football in a state where the clock runs continuously once the lead reaches 35, and assume the college game must have something similar. Others have seen a college box score with a 10-minute fourth quarter and concluded that a rule was triggered. Neither is right, and the difference between an automatic rule and a voluntary one matters more than it first appears.
| Code | Automatic mercy rule | What happens in a blowout |
|---|---|---|
| NCAA football, all divisions | None | Head coaches and referee may agree to shorten remaining quarters |
| NFL | None | Game is played to 60 minutes |
| High school, 11-player (NFHS) | Left to each state association | Usually a running clock at a set margin in the second half |
| Six-man football, Texas UIL | 45 points | Game ends at halftime or any time after |
| NCAA softball | 8 runs after five innings | Game ends |
| NCAA baseball | 10 runs after seven innings, by conference rule or prior consent | Game ends |
The table makes the college position look like an oversight. It is a decision, and the rules committee has had the alternative in front of it for decades without adopting it.
One clarification on vocabulary. Broadcasters and box scores sometimes say a game was played "with a running clock" when what happened was a shortened quarter. The current rulebook goes further than leaving the running clock out: an approved ruling under Rule 3-2-2 says that when coaches ask for one, it is not allowed, and normal clock rules apply for the whole game. What can be shortened is the length of the quarters, not the way the clock runs inside them. Reports of older games, such as Florida State against Savannah State in 2012, describe coaches agreeing to a running clock anyway, which is one reason the vocabulary is muddled.
Rule 3-2-2: what the rulebook allows instead
The sentence is short enough to quote. Rule 3-2-2-a reads: "Any time during the game, the playing time of any remaining period or periods and the intermission between halves may be shortened by mutual agreement of the opposing head coaches and the referee."
Each phrase does some work.
"Any time during the game" means the agreement does not have to wait for halftime. It can be reached with six minutes left in the second quarter or between the third and fourth.
"Any remaining period or periods" means the quarter in progress can be cut along with those still to come. The rule names no minimum, so a quarter can be trimmed to 12 minutes, to 10, or to almost nothing.
"And the intermission between halves" is the part people forget. The 20-minute halftime can be shortened under the same agreement, which matters when the reason for hurrying is an approaching storm as much as the score.
"Mutual agreement of the opposing head coaches and the referee" is a three-way veto. The winning coach cannot impose it. The losing coach cannot demand it. The referee is not obliged to go along with either.
- One coach raises itUsually at halftime or the end of the third quarter, and usually through the officials. Either sideline may start the conversation.
- The other coach agreesWithout this, nothing changes. A trailing coach who wants his players to have the full game can simply decline.
- The referee agreesThe referee is the third party named in the rule and must consent to the new length.
- The clock is resetThe remaining quarters are set to the agreed length, most often 10 or 12 minutes, and the change is announced.
- Play resumesThe clock stops and starts under the normal rules, and every other rule applies as usual. The final score, the statistics and the result count in full.
The sequence under NCAA Rule 3-2-2. Nothing in it is triggered by the score; each step depends on someone choosing to take it.
The rulebook's own approved ruling on the article gives the textbook case: the score is 56-0 at halftime, and the coaches and the referee agree that the third and fourth quarters will be 12 minutes each. The coaches also ask for a running clock. The ruling is that the 12-minute quarters are legal and the running clock is not. It reads like an example drafted by someone who had officiated that exact game.
What the rule does not do is let anyone stop a game outright on the score. It permits shortening. A game that has been cut to two eight-minute quarters is still a game with a second half and a final whistle.
How the agreement gets used: 10-minute quarters in guarantee games
Nearly every use of Rule 3-2-2 looks the same. It is the first or second Saturday of September. A team from one of the major conferences is hosting an opponent from the Football Championship Subdivision that has been paid to make the trip. The score at halftime is somewhere north of 40-0. By the third quarter both benches are playing freshmen.
| Game | Date | Score when agreed | What was shortened | Final |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Clemson vs. South Carolina State | September 17, 2016 | 45-0 at halftime | Both second-half quarters to 12 minutes | 59-0 |
| Arkansas vs. Arkansas-Pine Bluff | August 29, 2024 | 49-0 at halftime | Both second-half quarters to 10 minutes | 70-0 |
| Georgia vs. Tennessee Tech | September 7, 2024 | 45-0 after three quarters | Fourth quarter to 10 minutes | 48-3 |
| South Alabama vs. Northwestern State | September 2024 | 87-10 after three quarters | Fourth quarter to 6 minutes | 87-10 |
| Florida State vs. Savannah State | September 8, 2012 | Seven-touchdown lead in the second quarter | Running clock agreed during a lightning delay | 55-0, called in the third quarter |
The South Alabama game is the most extreme recent example. Six minutes is 40 percent of a quarter, and neither team scored in it.
Who asks, and why
It is more often the trailing coach, and the reason is rarely pride. An FCS roster has fewer scholarship players and less depth behind them. By the fourth quarter of a game like these, its second-string linemen have been on the field against bigger opponents for most of the afternoon, and the coach has a conference season starting within a week or two that will decide whether his own year is a success. Fifteen fewer minutes of football is 20-odd fewer snaps for players he cannot replace. The arrangement that brings these teams together in the first place, and the split between the subdivisions, is explained in our guide to the FBS and the FCS.
The winning coach usually has no objection. His starters are already out. His only cost is a few lost repetitions for his third string.
Why it does not happen more often
Because somebody says no. A trailing coach may feel that his players traveled to play 60 minutes and should. A leading coach may want his young quarterback to run a full fourth quarter of offense. There are blowouts every September that go the distance for one of those reasons. The agreement is also invisible unless it is reached: no announcement is made when a coach declines, so the refusals do not make the news.
Weather endings: when a shortened college football game counts as final
A second route to an early finish has nothing to do with mercy, though it produces some of the same box scores.
Under Rule 3-3-3 the referee may suspend a game when conditions require it, and lightning is the usual cause. If play cannot be resumed that day, the rule sets out four possible outcomes. The game can be completed on a later date. It can be terminated with a final score. It can be forfeited. Or it can be declared no contest, as though it had never begun. When both teams belong to one conference, that conference's policy decides. When they do not, the two athletic directors, consulting their coaches, must agree on one of the four, and on the final score if they choose termination.
College football has no equivalent of baseball's official-game threshold. A baseball game becomes official after a set number of innings. The football rule names no minimum number of minutes or quarters. A result stands because the people empowered to decide have agreed that it should.
The cases show the range.
Florida State and Savannah State, in 2012, is the one where weather and mercy overlapped. With the Seminoles ahead by seven touchdowns in the second quarter, a lightning delay of nearly an hour gave the coaches and officials time to agree on a running clock for the rest of the night. The storm came back anyway, and the game was halted for good with 8:59 left in the third quarter at 55-0.
Kentucky and Southern Miss opened the 2024 season in Lexington with a kickoff pushed back more than two hours by lightning. A second delay arrived in the third quarter. The schools agreed to end it there, 31-0, and the result went into the record as a complete game.
Florida and Idaho, in 2014, is the opposite outcome. Heavy rain and lightning in Gainesville delayed the start for hours, the opening kickoff was returned, and the field was then judged unsafe. The game was declared no contest. No statistics, no result.
The timing rules that govern a lightning suspension, including the 30-minute wait after each strike, are set out in our guide to how long a college football game lasts.
What coaches do without a rule: backups, the run game and the knee
In the absence of anything automatic, the sport relies on a set of habits that every coach knows and most follow.
The first is substitution. In a game that is out of reach by halftime, the starting quarterback has usually thrown his last pass before the band takes the field. The second string plays the third quarter and the third string, walk-ons included, plays the fourth. This is the nearest thing to a universal rule, and a coach who leaves his Heisman candidate in during the fourth quarter of a 50-point game will hear about it.
The second is play selection. The offense stops throwing. It runs between the tackles, lets the play clock wind down to a few seconds before each snap, and does not call timeouts. It stays in bounds. A 15-minute quarter played this way might contain two possessions.
The third is declining to score. A ball carrier who breaks free late in a rout will sometimes slide down at the 3-yard line. A team with first-and-goal in the final minutes will take a knee three times and hand the ball back on downs. Field goals are passed up. On defense, the leading team plays its reserves in a soft coverage, and an opponent's late touchdown to avoid a shutout is tolerated without much resistance.
The problem with asking backups to stop
There is a real tension in all this, and coaches talk about it openly. The fourth quarter of a blowout is the only game action a third-string running back may see all year. He has practiced since August for it. Telling him to run hard but not too far is an odd instruction, and most coaches will not give it. Their position is that the courtesy lies in who is on the field and what plays are called. Once the ball is snapped, the player plays.
That is how a team ends up scoring 70 without trying to. The backups are still better than the opponent's exhausted starters, a simple dive play breaks for 60 yards, and the scoreboard keeps moving.
What does not count as mercy
Kneeling out the final seconds of a close game is clock management. Sitting on a 10-point lead is strategy. The conventions above apply only when the outcome has been settled for some time, and where that line falls is a matter of feel. Three scores in the fourth quarter is a reasonable working definition, and four at any point in the second half.
Why college football has no mercy rule
The NCAA Football Rules Committee has never adopted a point-differential rule, and the reasons are practical before they are philosophical.
The backups need the snaps. A roster in the top subdivision carries 100 or so players, most of whom will not start. Lopsided games are where they play. Since 2018, a player has been able to appear in up to four games in a season without using one of his four seasons of competition, and the fourth quarter of a blowout is where coaches spend those appearances, a mechanism described in our guide to college football redshirt rules. A running clock would cut those minutes roughly in half.
People have paid. Seventy or eighty thousand tickets were sold on the understanding that the game is 60 minutes long. So were the concessions and the parking. The visiting FCS team was guaranteed a payment for a full game, and its own players' families are in the stands.
Television has a window. A broadcast sold as three and a half hours of programming, with its commercial breaks placed at intervals across four quarters, does not want the second half to be over in 40 minutes.
The statistics count. College records are kept on full games. Rushing titles, scoring averages and all-time marks would be distorted if some teams played 60 minutes a week and others played 48. The committee has been reluctant to create two classes of game.
Then the argument that carries the most weight. An automatic rule takes the decision away from the team it is supposed to protect. Under Rule 3-2-2 the losing coach has a veto, and if he believes his players are better served by finishing the game they prepared for, he can insist on it. Under a 35-point running clock he could not. The college rule treats the trailing team as adults who can ask for relief if they want it. That is a defensible position, and probably the right one for a sport whose players are 18 to 23.
The cost is that relief depends on the goodwill of the man on the other sideline. Most of the time it is there.
High school is different: the running clock, state by state
The rulebook used by nearly every state for high school football is published by the National Federation of State High School Associations, and it takes the opposite approach. Its Rule 3 lets each state association establish a point differential at which a game is terminated, or guidelines for a running clock once that differential is reached. Most have done one or the other.
The usual form is a running clock. Once a team's lead reaches the state's threshold in the second half, the clock stops only for a short list of events, typically scores, charged timeouts and injuries, and otherwise runs through incompletions, out-of-bounds plays and first downs. If the trailing team closes the gap below the threshold, some states revert to normal timing and others do not.
The thresholds are similar without being uniform.
| State association | Margin | What it triggers |
|---|---|---|
| Iowa | 35 points | Running clock |
| Utah | 35 points after halftime | Running clock at all levels of high school play |
| Kentucky | 35 points, lowered from 36 | Running clock |
| New Jersey | 33 points in the second half | Running clock |
| Louisiana | 42 points | Running clock, at any time in the game |
| Texas, 11-man | None | Full game; coaches may agree to end early |
| Texas, six-man | 45 points at halftime or later | Game ends |
These are examples as they have been reported, not a complete register, and state associations amend them often. Kentucky's rule began at 45 points in 2001 and has been lowered twice. Anyone who needs the current figure for a particular state should read that association's handbook.
The Connecticut experiment
One state tried to regulate the coach instead of the clock. From 2006 to 2016, Connecticut's association suspended a head coach for the following game if his team won by 50 points or more. It was an unusual rule, and it produced some contorted late-game play-calling as teams with a big lead tried to stay under the number. In 2016 the state replaced it with a conventional running clock.
Texas stands apart for a different reason. Its public schools play 11-man football under the NCAA rulebook, with modifications, and so inherit the college position: no automatic rule, and an early ending only if the coaches agree.
Six-man football and the 45-point rule
There is one corner of American football where a game simply stops.
Six-man football was devised in 1934 by Stephen Epler, a teacher in Chester, Nebraska, for schools too small to field 11. It is played on a field 80 yards long and 40 wide. The offense needs 15 yards for a first down, every player is an eligible receiver, and a kicked extra point is worth two because kicking is the harder skill to find in a school with 30 boys. Scores are enormous. A final of 70-60 is unremarkable, and it is reached in four 10-minute quarters.
With scoring at that rate, a mismatch gets out of hand in minutes, and the small-school codes deal with it bluntly. In Texas, where the University Interscholastic League sanctions six-man football on a large scale, a game ends when one team leads by 45 points or more at halftime or at any moment afterward. There is no running clock stage, and at six-man scoring rates a lead of that size can be built inside a single quarter. The officials signal, the teams shake hands, and the result stands. Players call it being "45'd."
The rule changes how the game is coached at both ends. A team trailing by 38 late in the second quarter is playing to reach halftime under the number so that it gets a third quarter at all. A team ahead by 44 with the ball knows its next score ends the night. Some coaches with an early lead will deliberately slow down so that their younger players get a second half.
Eight-man and nine-man football, played in the Plains and the upper Midwest, borrow the idea in varying forms. Some state associations end those games outright at a large margin, others apply a running clock first, and the margins and the point in the game at which they apply differ from state to state. They are worth checking in the local handbook.
Nobody in six-man country regards the rule as an insult. It exists because rosters are tiny, the same players go both ways without a break, and a game that is 60-0 at the half has nothing left to offer either side.
222-0 and 100-6: the scores that prompt the question
Every discussion of blowouts in college football starts in Atlanta on October 7, 1916.
Cumberland College of Lebanon, Tennessee, had dropped its football program but was still under contract to play Georgia Tech, with a forfeit fee it could not afford. A student manager assembled a team, largely from his fraternity brothers, and took it to Grant Field. Tech's coach was John Heisman. The usual account holds that Heisman was settling a score from a baseball game the previous spring, in which Cumberland had beaten Tech 22-0 with a lineup said to include professionals.
Tech scored 63 points in the first quarter and 63 in the second. It was 126-0 at halftime. Heisman then agreed to shorten the third and fourth quarters from 15 minutes to 12, and Tech added 54 and 42. The final was 222-0. Tech did not attempt a pass, and by most accounts neither team was credited with a first down, because Tech scored before it needed one.
So the most lopsided game ever played was also a shortened one. The provision that modern coaches invoke at 45-0 was used, in spirit, at 126-0.
Houston 100, Tulsa 6
The modern counterpart was played in the Astrodome on November 23, 1968. Houston, ranked 11th and coached by Bill Yeoman, had beaten Idaho 77-3 the week before. Tulsa arrived with a roster thinned by influenza; some players were too ill to travel and others played sick. The 100 points Houston scored that night remain the most by a team at the top level of the college game. Most of them came after halftime, when a contest that had been merely one-sided came apart.
Twenty-one years later Houston scored 95 against SMU, which was in its first season back after the NCAA had shut its program down. That game drew sharper criticism than the Tulsa one had, because the opponent's weakness was so well known in advance.
None of these games would have been stopped under the rules in force, then or now. The Tulsa and SMU games went 60 minutes. Georgia Tech, for what it is worth, was no fluke of scheduling in those years. It claimed a national title the following season.
Running up the score: polls, computers and the unwritten code
College football gave its coaches a reason to win big that professional sports never have. For most of the sport's history the national champion was chosen by vote.
The Associated Press poll began in 1936. Sportswriters who had seen a handful of the top teams in person ranked all of them, and a 49-0 win read better in a Sunday newspaper than a 17-7 one. A contender from a weaker conference had a particular incentive, since margin was the only evidence it could offer. The workings of the two major polls are explained in our piece on the AP poll and the coaches poll.
Heisman himself complained about this. He argued that writers judged teams by the size of their scores, and the Cumberland game has sometimes been read as his demonstration of how meaningless a big number could be.
The incentive was written into a formula when the Bowl Championship Series arrived in 1998. Several of the computer rankings that fed the BCS standings counted margin of victory, and a team could improve its position by scoring a fifth touchdown against an opponent it had already beaten by four. In June 2002 the BCS removed margin of victory from the computer component, on the reasoning that teams should not be rewarded for beating up on weak opponents. Two of the computer operators withdrew sooner than change their models. Our guide to how the Bowl Championship Series worked covers the standings in full.
The current system makes the same point in its founding document. The College Football Playoff selection committee's protocol tells members to weigh results against common opponents "without incenting margin of victory." How completely a room of committee members can ignore a 50-point win is another matter. The format the committee now fills is described in our explainer on the College Football Playoff.
The coaches who were accused
The unwritten code says: stop when the game is decided. The names attached to breaking it are mostly from the poll era.
Woody Hayes had Ohio State try a two-point conversion while leading Michigan 50-14 in 1968. Asked why, he is said to have replied that he went for two because he could not go for three. In 1995 Steve Spurrier's Florida team scored 52 at Georgia, in a year when the game was played in Athens, and Spurrier made no secret of wanting to be the first visitor to put 50 on the board in that stadium.
What those episodes share is a rivalry. Running it up on a paid visitor from a lower division is considered poor form. Running it up on the team a coach most wants to beat has always been treated, by the winning side at least, as something closer to the point of the exercise.
The NFL plays all 60 minutes as well
The professional rulebook is, if anything, stricter. The Official Playing Rules of the National Football League contain no point-differential rule and no counterpart to the college provision letting coaches shorten a regular-season or postseason game. Sixty minutes means 60 minutes.
The league's most lopsided result came in its championship game. On December 8, 1940, the Chicago Bears beat Washington 73-0 in the title game, and every minute was played. The widest margin in a regular-season game since the 1970 merger is generally listed as 59 points, reached twice, most recently when New England beat Tennessee 59-0 in a snowstorm in October 2009.
Blowouts of that size are rare in the NFL for structural reasons. A salary cap, a draft that sends the best prospects to the worst teams and a shared-revenue model keep the distance between the top and bottom of the league far narrower than the distance between a top-five college program and an FCS visitor. There are no guarantee games. A rule for 60-point margins would almost never be used.
The contrast with a college mismatch is worth spelling out. An NFL backup quarterback entering a 35-point game is a drafted rookie or a veteran who practices against a professional defense every day. The fourth quarter is useful to him, and nobody in the stadium thinks the contest has become unsafe. The gap that produces a 70-0 college score, a major-program roster of more than 100 players against one assembled on a fraction of the budget, has no professional equivalent.
There is even a small formal reason for an NFL team to keep scoring. Net points, in conference games and then in all games, sit well down the league's list of tiebreakers, behind head-to-head results, division and conference records and strength of schedule, a sequence set out in our explainer on NFL playoff seeding. They are almost never reached. They do mean the professional standings have a written use for margin of victory, which is more than the college selection process admits to.
The same habits apply when a professional game does get away. Starters come out, the offense runs the ball, and the final minutes are spent in the kneel-down formation. The league does not ask for more than that.
The college sports that do have one: run rules in baseball and softball
The NCAA has no general objection to ending games early. It does so in other sports.
- 8Softball, runs after five innings
- 10Baseball, runs after seven innings
- 0Football, points at any time
Softball's run-ahead rule applies throughout the season and the NCAA tournament. Baseball's applies only by conference rule or by agreement before the game. Football has no margin at all.
Softball's run-ahead rule is the firmest. A game ends when one team leads by eight or more runs after five innings, or after four and a half if the home team is the one ahead. The rule is in force during the regular season, in conference tournaments and through the NCAA tournament. Since 2023 it has applied in the championship series of the Women's College World Series, the one stage that had previously been exempt.
College baseball is more cautious. Its rulebook allows a game to be stopped after seven innings if one team leads by 10 or more runs, but only where the conference has adopted the rule or both coaches have agreed to it before the first pitch. It has not been used in the NCAA tournament or the College World Series, where games go nine. The professional game has nothing of the kind, for reasons set out on our page about the MLB mercy rule.
Why those sports and not football
The usual answer is the schedule. A Division I softball team can schedule up to 56 regular-season games and a baseball team the same number, often two or three in a weekend with the same pitching staff. Ending a 12-0 game two innings early saves arms and gets the next game started on time. No individual result carries much weight.
A college football team plays 12 regular-season games. Each one is sold as an event, played once a week and counted in a ranking that decides a playoff field. Cutting one short by rule feels different when there are so few.
There is a second difference, less often mentioned. A baseball game has no clock, so a rout has no natural end; the losing team could in theory bat forever. Football already has a limit built in. However bad it gets, it is over after 60 minutes, and the coaches have the means to make that shorter if both of them want to. More guides to the American game and its rules are collected on our United States hub.