Okay, so I’ve been messing around with this idea for a while, and today I finally got to make it a reality. It’s a “football clock” thing, and I’m here to tell you all about how I did it.
I started by thinking about how the clock works in football games. You know, how it stops and starts all the time. I learned that each team gets three timeouts per half to stop the clock, and in the NFL, they get extra timeouts in overtime. Also, there’s this thing called a “fair-catch kick” where the clock starts when the kick happens and stops at the end of the play.
Then I dug a bit deeper into the whole stopping and starting thing. Turns out, the clock stops when a play is over, and it starts again when the offensive team snaps the ball. And get this – the clock always stops on a first down, even if the player doesn’t go out of bounds. After that, the officials signal when to restart the clock if the ball didn’t go out of bounds.
New Rules for 2024
I found out that starting in the 2024 season, there’s a new rule. The referee will stop the game clock with exactly two minutes left in the second and fourth quarters when the game clock is running, and the ball is not live. If the ball is live, they stop the clock as soon as the play ends.
The Play Clock
This part got a bit tricky. I learned that if the play clock is still running after the play starts, it can be reset to 40 seconds during the play. And they have time to reset it to 25 seconds at the end of the down if they need to.
Putting It All Together
So, with all this info, I started building my “football clock.” I focused on these key things:
- Timeouts: I made sure to include the rule about three timeouts per half for each team.
- Fair-Catch Kick: I added a feature to handle the clock starting and stopping during these kicks.
- First Downs: I programmed it so the clock always stops on a first down.
- New 2024 Rule: I incorporated the rule about stopping the clock with two minutes left in the second and fourth quarters.
- Play Clock Reset: I added the option to reset the play clock to 40 or 25 seconds as needed.
It was a lot of trial and error, a whole lot, I’m not even gonna lie. But I finally got it working. Now I have a pretty cool “football clock” that follows all the real rules. It’s not perfect, I’m sure there are still some bugs to work out, but it’s a good start. Just wanted to share my little project and how I went about it. Maybe it’ll give someone else some ideas. Who knows, that’s what I did after all, just researched and tried to figure it out. It’s pretty satisfying to see it actually working now!
