"It's ridiculous," said Arizona's Rich Rodriguez.
Rodriguez has also been at the forefront of the fast football trend.
"For me it goes back to the fundamental rules of football," Rodriguez said. "The offense knows where they are going and when they are going to snap the ball. That's their advantage. The defense is allowed to move all 11 guys before the ball is snapped. That's their advantage.
"Is there any hard data, or just somebody saying that?" Arizona coach Rich Rodriguez said. "If there was big concern with that, wouldn't the teams that practice fast be concerned with it? We don't have any more injuries because we practice fast."
"I would think they would have some type of study that proves that," he said.
Rodriguez has been pushing the pace with his teams for more than two decades and doesn't buy safety concerns.

"What's next? You can only have three downs? If you play that extra down you have more chance of injury."
Mississippi coach Hugh Freeze said he found about the proposal when he got a phone call from Auburn's Gus Malzahn, a fellow advocate of up-tempo offense.
"I said, 'Y'all are kidding me. That's not true,' " Freeze said he told Malzahn.
Freeze said he was skeptical of the health risks presented by up-tempo offense because he's never seen any data to support the claim.

"If that was the case wouldn't every team that went fast in practice have more injuries?" he said.
Freeze and Rodriguez both said their offenses rarely get plays off within 10 seconds of the ball being spotted.
"If they say it's not occurring anyway, why put in a rule?" Freeze said. "I just don't really understand what we gain from this other this rule other than a chance to create more chaos."

It's not just the up-tempo coaches who voiced their disapproval with the proposal.
"I just spent two days at Big Ten meetings and it wasn't even brought up," Rutgers coach Kyle Flood said. "It doesn't make sense to me."
The Scarlet Knights ranked 84th in the country in plays per game (71).

Cincinnati coach Tommy Tuberville, a former defensive coordinator whose team averaged 78 plays per game (28th in the nation), said the proposal was never discussed during last month's American Football Coaches of Association convention.
"This came out of left field," he said. "It's wrong."

"If the food tastes good, don't change the recipe," said Baylor coach Art Briles, who has built a program that has traditionally struggled into a winner with perhaps the nation's fastest-paced offense. "We've got a good game. Let's let the fans enjoy it. I just don't see the sense behind it."

As North Carolina head coach Larry Fedora points out, the change of rules in the last two minutes suggests player safety is not the overriding concern.
..so we are not worried about player safety in the last two minutes?

Coaching is a brotherhood and a noble profession. I would hope there are not those in our business who would sneak behind everyone else's back and try to get something passed without the others in the profession having the opportunity to be heard. It's a reaction to the success of Auburn and Texas A&M, clearly," he said. "So rather than innovate defensively and re-spawn defensively, it's like -- and this is the lowest level of bureaucracy that exists in football - it's like rather than adapt our teams or coach our teams, what we're going to try to do instead is invent a rule." — Mike Leach

One of my personal favorites:

"The only thing risking injury in an up tempo football game is the defense's pride! Nut up, it's football!"
— Bob Stitt, Colorado School of Mines