It’s good to see collegiate athletic conferences wanting to reduce the length of football games.

The Mid-American Conference wants to trim a whole five minutes off its average time of 3 hours, 25 minutes.

The Pacific-12 Conference is cutting its halftime break from 20 minutes to 15 minutes. Television commercials will be reduced in frequency and length.

Commendable to be sure, but those measures won’t provide a very noticeable difference.

Really, the only way to shorten college football games is to eliminate the rule that stops the clock when a team gets a first down.

2-A-DAYS: Football, at any level for as long as I can remember, has always started its “official” practice schedule with conditioning workouts then two-a-days. Players loathed those sessions, normally conducted in blistering August heat. At their very best, an early morning and early evening schedule provided a slim break from the high temperatures but then the whole day was shot.

In recent years, though, many college coaches have gone away from the typical two-a-day practices, both of which consisted of some form of contact.

The NCAA has approved a plan this year that prevents teams from holding multiple practices with contact in a single day.

The reasoning is simple — player safety.

According to the NCAA’s Sport Science Institute, 58 percent of the football practice concussions that occur over the course of a year happen during the preseason. Brian Hainline, the NCAA’s chief medical officer, says August also is a peak month for catastrophic injuries resulting from conditioning rather than contact, such as heatstroke and cardiac arrest.

Football teams will be able to have two practice sessions in a given day but one has to be a padless walk-through. NFL teams do that now and it seems the trickle-down effect has hit the college ranks. Wilmington High School football coach Scott Killen believes this will be the last year high school teams will be able to conduct two contact-related practices in the same day.

COLLEGE AWAITS: But not for many athletes.

According to NCAA research, there are more than 1,000,000 high school football players in the country. But less than 100,000 of them play collegiately. The actual figure is 6.5 percent.

On the basketball court, there are more than 500,000 boys and 400,000 girls who play in high school yet just 3.4 percent of the boys (18,320) and 3.8 percent of the girls (16,319) play in college.

The highest percentage of high school players who make it in their sport at the collegiate level is ice hockey. A total of 23.4 percent of the girls who place ice hockey and 11.2 percent of the boys who play in high school get the same opportunity in college.

Lacrosse is next in line as 11.9 percent of the boys and 12.6 percent of the girls who play in high school are able to play in college.

The bottom line: Don’t stopping dreaming of playing sports in college but enjoy the high school experience. For those who won’t play a sport in high school because of … pick one, the coach, a job, a significant other … you only have four chances to play a sport. A missed opportunity is one you’ll never get back.