Half time warm up rule: 17 & 3 USC on Coach

[Bob M.]

REPLY: I'm anxious to see how the Fed wants us to handle this. I'll begin by saying that we always send the L and B to get the two teams and ensure they're out when they need to be, so we haven't had a problem. But for the sake of discussion, suppose we didn't do that. We've always been told that the 3 minute warm-up was mandatory, i.e. even if a team arrived late, they still needed to be given their three minutes. We were even told that it's a liability issue. We had to ensure they had the proper time to warm up after arriving. Now if they arrived late and we had to delay that three-minute warmup period, it was a USC flag. But we would not start the 3:00 clock if a team wasn't there and would never short change them that warmup time. Is the Fed specifying something different now?? I couldn't tell for certain by what I had read.