I am posting this after finally fixing this problem.
We have Cisco 7200ubr equipment. TOD does not seem to function on these devices, and it is a terrible idea to run them as they use udp-small-servers which are regularly attacked. After multiple attempts to get UDP/37 TOD running on these devices I gave up.
On Linux (Centos is mine/Redhat enterprise) the TOD service is part of the xinetd daemon. Xinetd is always running for a bunch of reasons, but to turn on the UDP version of TOD you will need to go into /etc/xinetd.d/ and edit time-dgram, turn disable from YES to NO. restart xinetd "service xinetd restart" and the server will be enabled.
If you are running iptables you will have to open udp port 37 to your cable modems.
You can test it with the rdate command.
rdate -u -p "The -u tells it to look at udp, if you just do -p it will only look at the tcp version"
Thats it, carry on.