By Ryan McGee | ESPN.com
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Jadeveon Clowney
Al Messerschmidt/Getty Images
Would Jadeveon Clowney's hit have been illegal in 2013? Not exactly.
Amen and pass the potato salad. August practice has started.

We all know that two-a-days are the time for teams to sort out the depth chart and start sculpting the playbook. But this is also the time when coaches are familiarizing their teams with the handful of new and tweaked pages of the NCAA college football rulebook.

“We aren’t just teaching the players the new rules,” North Carolina coach Larry Fedora admits. “We are also teaching ourselves about the new rules.”

When teams hold official scrimmages, they will do so with actual game officials on the field, most assigned by the conference office, just as is the case for regular-season games. Yes, the refs are there to answer questions about the new regulations. But they are also there for themselves, to log some real-time, on-field experience with those new rules before the time comes to throw actual flags in actual games.

So, what are the handful of new rules we all need to get caught up before games start later this month? Grab a notebook, a whistle, and read ahead.

1. Illegal Hits

This isn’t a rule change. This is a penalty change.

What constitutes an illegal hit in 2013 hasn’t changed since 2008. You can’t lead with the crown of the helmet, target a defenseless player (think about a quarterback sifting into defense and drifting across the field after an interception), lower your head just before impact, deliberately “launch” into a tackle, or lead with a forearm, fist, hand, or elbow. And it’s still a judgment call on the field as to what looks illegal. The two explanations of an illegal hit in the NCAA rulebook both end with the phrase “when in question, it is a foul.”

But now, if a player is flagged with an illegal hit penalty, he also will be ejected from the game. Before you panic, it must be noted that illegal hits are now reviewable in the replay booth, which is new. The personal foul penalty will stand regardless, but the booth can overrule the ejection and the player can return to the game.

By the way, I’d like to make a clarification here. At ACC media days, conference officiating coordinator Doug Rhoads caused a bit of a firestorm (not to mention three days of "SportsCenter" debate) when he said that he thought Jadeveon Clowney’s famous Outback Bowl hit might have been illegal. He made those comments while I was taking notes for this piece and that’s not exactly what he said. He admitted that he’d only seen the play when it happened on TV from his hotel room in Miami, and he said at first blush that it was so fast and violent that “I really thought the guys on the field would have called it illegal.”

But the discussion that Rhoads really was trying to start by talking about “The Hit” was that, under this year’s rules, he believed that had Clowney been ejected, the replay booth would have watched it and let Clowney return to the game.

2. No spiking inside 3 seconds

The illegal hit penalty is receiving the lion’s share of the offseason ink (and criticism). But if you ask most coaches and officials which rule change they think might cause the most confusion, this is the one that comes up.

In order for a quarterback to spike the ball to stop the clock, there must be 3 seconds remaining on the game clock. If he attempts to stop the clock inside 3 seconds, then the clock will run off and the quarter will be over.

“The idea here is uniformity,” Rhoads said. “Every stadium has a different clock operator in the tower. Some stadiums have clocks that count down using tenths of seconds, but others don’t. That can kind of cause a mess. So now this is like basketball. We know that once we get down so many tenths of a second, there’s no way a team will have time to make an inbounds pass, catch, and get a shot off. This is like that. If we get inside 3 seconds, you have to run a play.”

He referenced two 2012 games where there had to be a review, a clock reset, and fractions of seconds were added to allow one more play. “It was a mess, quite frankly,” Rhoads said. “Now everyone knows what the situation is and once they get used to it, it’ll be no big deal.”

True. But the first time it comes into play, it’ll be a stadium full of people saying, “Do what now?”

3. Crackback blocks

On the line of scrimmage, if an offensive player is more than 7 yards out, wide of the tackle box, he cannot come back toward the original position of the ball and make contact. In other words, outside players can’t come blowing back into the play and block below the waist. None of this is really new.

What is new is that a player can now come back and block, but only if the block is clearly to the front of the blocked player. As Rhoads described it, “10 o’clock to 2 o’clock.”

At the snap, immediately, you still can’t come back in and crackback block anywhere. But once that initial second has passed, you must keep it within the newly defined 10-to-2 parameters.

“It might be a stretch to even call this a rule change,” Rhoads said. “It’s really just semantics.”

4. Returning after losing your helmet

One of 2012’s new rules said that if a player’s helmet came off during a play, he had to sit out the next play. This year, a team can “buy your way in” (Rhoads’ words) via a timeout. This will make timeout economics even more critical than they already were. Let’s go back to Clowney. Say South Carolina is in the middle of a big third-quarter goal-line stand and Clowney loses his helmet. Does Steve Spurrier burn a timeout to get his star back into the game, or does he hang onto it for the fourth quarter?

5. Last-minute injuries

If a player suffers an injury during the final minute of the final half and the clock stops solely for that injury, then the opposing team can take a 10-second clock runoff. However, the team with the injury can buy its way out of that runoff by burning a timeout. The idea here is to further eliminate faking injuries to stop the clock. It’s up to the offended team as to whether they take that clock runoff. It can be refused at any time.
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Ryan McGee | email
ESPN The Magazine, NASCAR
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ESPN The Magazine senior writer
2-time Sports Emmy winner
2010 NMPA Writer of the Year