If you want to have a miserable time watching sports these days, tune in to a college basketball game with about a 10-point margin and four minutes to go. There’s a good chance you’ll get your wish.
Vanderbilt’s 86-84 road win Wednesday night at Texas A&M was a disgrace to the sport, an eyesore of the highest order and a cry for help in a sport that too often doesn’t have a clue about how tedious it can become.
From the time the ball was inbounded with 3:33 remaining and Vanderbilt leading 70-60, it took more than 40 minutes of real time to complete the game. Why? In a game where officials blew the whistle for 52 total fouls, 14 were called in the final minutes, leading to 28 free throws. Toss in a couple of instant replay reviews, injury stoppages, timeouts and endless offense-defense substitutions by both coaches and you have the most unwatchable finish possible to a game that had the potential to be dramatic.
Would anyone in their right mind find that entertaining? These bungled end-of-game scenarios are absolutely killing the momentum of what has been an otherwise fantastic season in college hoops.
And what happened in College Station isn’t a one-off or just an SEC problem. Last Saturday, for instance, it took more than 30 minutes of actual time to play the last three of NC State’s 85-73 win over Wake Forest for similar reasons: Constant fouling, subbing and the compulsion of college referees these days to go to the monitor every time they’re unsure late in a game whose fingertip a ball nicked before it went out of bounds.
Who wants this?
In calls and texts to some administrators on Thursday morning, there is broad agreement that games are taking too long, officials are too reliant on the replay monitor and endless parades to the foul line suck the absolute life out of the game. For every great college basketball finish that comes down to a final possession, you will have at least one or two that gets pulled into a slog.
There is no reason for these games to so regularly overshoot the two-hour television windows. By the time Vanderbilt-Texas A&M was off the air Thursday, the ensuing Kentucky-Oklahoma game on SEC Network had fewer than eight minutes remaining in the first half.
How can anyone defend that? And guess what: In the upcoming NCAA tournament, where the TV networks squeeze in even longer commercial breaks, it will probably be worse.
The good news is, this can all be fixed — if college administrators and the NCAA men’s basketball oversight committee have the stomach to fix it.
Traditionally, men’s college basketball is glacially slow to change any rules. And the sport’s establishment gets especially offended by any suggestion that it should modify its game to look more like the NBA.
But a crisis like this demands some fresh thinking. And it has to start with one simple admission: It should never, ever, under any circumstance, take 40 minutes to play fewer than four minutes of game time the way Texas A&M and Vanderbilt fans suffered through on Wednesday.
So how do you fix it?
The most obvious and easiest change is to go from two halves of 20 minutes to four quarters of 10 minutes each. This is a no-brainer. Every other form of the sport plays four quarters except for men’s college basketball. Not only is it asinine, it’s actively harmful to the game.
Everyone in the sport knows that playing halves slows the game down because the moment a team commits a seventh foul, every subsequent foul results in a trip to the free-throw line for the rest of the half. If officials are calling the game tightly, that threshold can be crossed pretty quick.
In every other league, including women’s college basketball, the fouls reset every quarter and there is less time being spent in the bonus after a team commits its fifth foul. Again, there is absolutely no logical reason why men’s college basketball does not conform to this system.
The second easy fix is to get rid of the current instant replay system, where the officials look at pretty much every close out-of-bounds call in the final two minutes of a game, and go to a coaches-challenge system like the NBA employs.
Though even the NBA approach to instant replay has its detractors, and its officials too can get a little too monitor-happy in certain situations, college basketball simply cannot continue on its current course. It’s now relatively common to see officials make a call and then immediately signal for a review, second-guessing their own work. It takes too long, it brings the game to a halt, it happens with far too much frequency and it shouldn’t be acceptable.
Finding the right line between acceptable human error and the integrity of the game is always a tricky conversation. You want to get the close calls right, especially when there’s so much on the line, but nitpicking every loose-ball scramble or carom off a fingertip is a crutch for bad officiating and a road to nowhere.
Just give coaches a challenge they can use at any point in the game or keep in their back pocket to deploy when it really counts, whether it’s an out-of-bounds call or a controversial foul, like the one Arizona got called for with 3.2 seconds left last Saturday to give BYU a 96-95 victory. Think Tommy Lloyd would have liked to have veteran official Tony Padilla take a second look at that one?
That’s what replay should be used for. Otherwise? You gotta live with human error. It’s a better way than what college basketball currently has, and it would almost certainly prevent some unnecessary stoppages in the final few minutes.
The next two suggestions are in the more radical category but should be up for discussion.
The first is to adopt a 24-second shot clock. A lot of college coaches would not like this because they enjoy the ability to set up the offense in the half court and call plays from the sideline. There is also a longstanding argument that the majority of college players aren’t skilled enough to operate in a 24-second shot clock environment and it would make the game uglier and more frantic.
But the other side of that argument is that ultimately, players would adapt, it would help their long-term development for pro basketball and it would cut down on some of the foul-o-rama tactics at the end of games. It’s simply a math equation: When a team is trailing in the final few minutes, it’s often a better bet to play defense and try to get a stop when the shot clock is 24 seconds as opposed to 30.
The final suggestion is the most controversial. The NBA G League has for several years now used a one-free-throw rule, which means a player who gets fouled goes to the line for one shot only that is worth the corresponding number of points until the final two minutes of the game. In other words, if you’re fouled shooting a three, you get one shot worth three points. If you’re fouled shooting a layup, you get one shot worth two points.
It eliminates a lot of wasted time at the foul line and moves things along. It’s worth looking at because, let’s face it, free throws are the least-entertaining part of the sport.
All of these suggestions and more should be on the table if college basketball is serious about cleaning up its act and presenting a more fan-friendly product. And if you can’t admit that 40 minutes is way too long to play the final 213 seconds of a basketball game, you shouldn’t have any role in the future of the sport to begin with.