Timing of Official Time Outs

[kinetic.khaos (Kinetic Khaos (she/her))]

@Twixxi

I’m struggling to understand why people would be standing around wasting time. The JT is rarely involved in fixing the situation, and one of their primary jobs during lineup time is watching for timeouts. Signal the OTO to the JT, they acknowledge it but don’t call it until 25. Everyone else can get on with fixing things, they don’t have to wait for 25 to do that. Maybe they even fixed it during that time and the OTO becomes unnecessary.

The JT might be Head NSO and should thus be able to participate in the discussions between the officials.

If we feel that it is important, that the OTO does not add playtime a better solution would be to change the rules on when the period clock is stopped during an OTO as Twixxi suggested.

@speedy

White is leading by 5 points. Red has no clock stoppages left. A jam just ended with 58s on the period clock. After 5s of lineup time officials call an OTO. Next jam Red gets lead after 10s, gets into the pack for a quick 2 points and calls it off with 31s left on the period clock. So one more jam is played. That jam ends 4-0 in favor of Red.
If the OTO had been called even 2s later, the winner of the game would have been different.

I don’t want to be part of this scenario. Not even as a member of the red team.

This scenario can actually still happen even if the timeout is called after 25 s. The scenario would be particularly bad if the official calling the OTO were associated with team red and the OTO were to be called for dubious reasons. Thus changing the rules to avoid this scenario would be justified.

[jukeboxx]

We see that the poll is skewed towards “not waiting”, and we agree with that they should not wait around, but not at the expense of impacting the period clock. We have another suggestion to achieve the best of both.

Ideally officials can resolve problems within the 30 seconds, but there are instances where it does take longer. Ideally official timeouts don’t impact the flow of the game, but sometimes it can’t be helped. What CAN be helped is when the officials decide to stop the period clock. We believe that if an official timeout is taken it should be taken at the end of the 30 seconds. This doesn’t mean that the officials need to wait until the 30 seconds are up to actually signal for it. The HR could signal to the jam timer that there is something that needs to be resolved and the jam timer continues running the 30 seconds after which time either the officials are set in position and ready and the jam starts, or they are not and an official timeout is called. The “5 seconds” call could also work as a signal for the HR as a reminder that they could signal that an official timeout is definitely needed.

We can see a potential problem should the issue involve the jam timer - eg a longer conversation between the JT and the scoreboard. But this could easily be solved by another official stepping into the pivot line role during that time.

We are against officials impacting the running of the period clock at random. Clock management is an important part of the game and having moments where officials can impact a close game in this way can be problematic. This would also mean, that with an impending Official Timeout coming a team would still need to call a Team Timeout if they needed to conserve period clock, rather than receiving a free timeout instead.