On April 19, 2024, the NCAA approved several rule changes that would be in effect during this year’s college football season.
One of these rule changes included the introduction of the two-minute warning, an NFL staple for over eight decades.
During the Vegas Kickoff Classic between No. 23 USC and No. 13 LSU, ESPN announcer Rece Davis reminded fans about the new rule change with an intriguing side note. 
“There is a new two-minute timeout,” Davis said. “We’ve been asked not to call it a warning.”
“We can call it the two-minute warning in the NFL, not the two-minute timeout like they do in college, NBC play-by-play announcer Mike Tirico said during the first half of the NFL kickoff game. “I’ve been waiting all weekend to do that.”
So, what’s the deal? Why did the NCAA rechristen the two-minute warning, and why did it take them so long?
The NCAA’s rebranding of the rule alludes to its origins in football lore.
The NFL introduced the two-minute warning in 1942, more than two decades after the league’s inaugural season. In the league’s early days, timekeeping was basically a joke. The only people in the entire stadium keeping track of time were the officials, who followed along with the game clock via a stopwatch.
“Timekeeping could be very happenstance in the ’20s,” Washington sportswriter Dan Daly told the Guardian. “Sometimes, if the score was particularly one-sided, the umpire would just let the clock run to get the game over with. You’ll even find box scores saying quarters were only 12 or 10 minutes long. This was usually by prior agreement. Teams might have wanted to play a shorter game because they had a train to catch or had played multiple times in the same week or had a bunch of injuries. Or maybe the weather or the crowd size was just lousy. At any rate, the 60-minute game was hardly set in stone.”
Teams needed to know how much time remained in the contest to strategize and execute late-game scenarios. The league introduced the two-minute warning to help counteract its timekeeping issue.
“Teams would be down on the goal line, thinking they had enough time to run a play, and the umpire would be firing his pistol and saying, ‘Game over,'” Daly told the Guardian. “The warning was one way to keep the teams informed that the end was near.”
With time still being kept on the field, the AFL began using stadium clocks as the official game time across the league in the early 1960’s. The NFL started adopting the AFL’s convenience marvel later in the decade, right before the two leagues’ merger in 1966.

READ MORE: How do LSU students predict this weekend’s game against Vanderbilt?

But even after the NFL solved its clock-keeping conundrum, the two-minute warning stayed. Why?
The late break in the action was a strategic timeout at the end of each half. The stoppage is a fourth timeout for a team trailing late in a game.
Little did anybody know that the rule would become much more valuable for the NFL as time passed. As the league grew its TV presence, the timeout became a crucial point in the game for its media partners.
With how suffocating the NFL’s grip on the TV market is in 2024, it’s no surprise that advertisers would value a guaranteed stoppage at the most exciting part of the game.
The two-minute timeout shows the NCAA’s commitment to its broadcast partners, especially after ESPN’s recent $7.8 billion extension to televise the College Football Playoff through the 2030-2031 season. 
“This is not an additional or a new timeout,” said A.J. Edds, co-chairman of the NCAA Football Rules Committee and vice president of football administration for the Big Ten. “This is a fixed position in the second and fourth quarters where media partners can reliably know they’re going to have an opportunity to take a media break.”
The 2024 national championship between Michigan and Washington had 25 million average viewers. It was the most-viewed college football national championship since 2020’s matchup between Clemson and LSU. Viewership was up 45% year over year and 11% above 2022’s game, via Amanda Brooks of ESPN Press Room.
The NCAA guaranteeing its advertisers a media break near the end of each half only makes ESPN feel better about spending nearly $8 billion on college football’s expanded playoff.
“This will hopefully give them a larger runway to get their breaks in over the course of the half in the second and fourth quarters,” Edds said. 
The NCAA’s renaming of the two-minute warning comes with the reality that its purpose had evolved into something much more than reminding the sidelines how much time was left in the half.
“We’re not warning anybody of anything, so we’re going to adopt those words,” NCAA coordinator of officials Steve Shaw told The Athletic.
The two-minute timeout kept the sport more competitive by enhancing comeback opportunities and acting as an advertiser magnet. 
“Our TV partners have been pretty good about recognizing the name is a little different than the NFL,” Shaw said. “There’s been jokes here and there, but I think it describes what it really is. It’s that timeout. We’re not warning anybody. Everybody knows the time. We just named it that.”
For the NCAA, the mistake wasn’t adding a two-minute timeout, but the fact that it took them 82 years after the NFL did it to do so themselves.