Six fouls. Timeouts that magically move the basketball 50 feet. A shorter shot clock. No more possession arrow. Abolish charging calls.
If you have been around college basketball for the past several years, you have heard all of these ideas – which range from outlandish to outrageous to unnecessary to unwise – suggested as ways to improve the game of men’s college basketball. Which, though rules changes traditionally have covered all NCAA divisions and the NAIA, really means NCAA Division I.
There are venues to watch many of these rules in action, if one is desperate to see the sport played in such a manner. It can be argued one reason for college basketball’s enduring popularity is the absence of these rules (or, in some cases, gimmicks).
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Which is not to say the game is perfect, beyond enhancement.
John Adams has ideas about what could make it better. He was the NCAA coordinator of officials from 2008-2015, following years running the basketball officiating for the Indiana state high school association and conferences in various NCAA divisions, including the Horizon League in Division I. Anytime he wants to have a coffee at the McDonald’s off Binford Boulevard in Indianapolis, I am eager to hear what he has to say about the game.
“There are four different games – the NBA, FIBA, college men and women – and they all have different rules and different expected outcomes, is what I call it,” Adams told the Sporting News. “The NBA is way over the line toward offensive basketball, and it should be. You know what a ticket costs? I want to see 100-98. I don’t want 56-54. The women’s game … I don’t profess to understand it; I don’t know all their rules. It works for them.
“When I think about rules now for men’s basketball, I’ve been on the inside. Now that I’m a fan, I see the holes in our game. I watch a lot of college basketball now, and I see things that affect the entertainment value, so that’s kind of where I’m coming from.”
Those who follow Adams on Twitter – @jwasports, if you’re interested – can find him on a lot of nights tweeting about important college basketball games and how officiating and rules impact the outcomes, almost like one’s own personal Gene Steratore.
If those who are members of the NCAA men’s basketball rules committee are listening, these are the ideas Adams would propose to impact the college game moving forward (and all of them are better than the “magic timeout”):
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1. Quarters. NCAA men’s basketball at all levels is played in 20-minute halves. At the highest level, though, that’s not entirely true. Because of media timeouts at the 16, 12, 8 and 4-minute marks, it’s actually played in much shorter segments. Adams suggests switching to 10-minute quarters and resetting the foul count at the end of each, rather than have teams hit the 7-foul mark (which leads to the one-and-one free throw) and 10-foul mark (which leads to each foul being worth two free throws).
His idea would place the foul count at five before free throws on non-shooting fouls.
“I understand the value of the timeout in terms of money,” Adams said. “There’s a little added drama with the quarters. Not a lot, but some. But I think resetting the fouls makes for a more entertaining game. Honestly, what fan wants to watch a parade to the free throw line?”
Adams said the resistance to quarters has been related to working out how to put equivalent ad breaks into a game broken into quarters. People are accustomed to how it works now. But he believes quarters also allows players more natural rest time, which means they might handle more minutes, which means the better players on the floor more.
2. Charging. In the 2013-14 season, when Adams was NCAA coordinator, the NCAA changed the standard for a secondary defender – a player who is not initially guarding the offensive player in question – to draw a charge to “once an offensive player has started his upward motion with the ball to attempt a field goal or pass, a defensive player is not permitted to move into his path.” That change lasted only a year because officials complained it was to difficult to call – NBA officials enforce a very similar rule every night of the week – and many coaches loathed the decline in charge calls.
Adams would like to see the 2014 rule again.
“When you start the try, the defender has to be set,” Adams said. “I think when the offensive player puts two hands on the ball, or a plant foot – you plant and lift – when that happens, the secondary defender has to already be stationary and cannot move.
“The guy trying to draw a cheap foul, the cheap charge, let’s restrict him. I think that makes a better game.”
My friend Brendan Prunty, formerly a college basketball journalist in New Jersey and now a vice president with a marketing agency, coined the term “charbage” to describe the cheap charges Adams acknowledges are a blight against the game.
“Trying to judge that as a referee is incredibly difficult,” Adams said. “But if all they have to do is make sure the defender was there, in position, before the try started, they have a better chance of getting that play right.”
And it’s a safety issue. When Art Hyland was secretary-editor of the rules committee, he often discussed the need to reduces “crashes” at the basket. There’s always been one major obstacle, though, to a change that makes charging less common.
“Coaches make the rules,” Adams said. “And they love drawing charges.”
3. Widen the lane. Currently the width of the college lane – or the “paint”, as so many now call it – is 12 feet. In the NBA, it’s 16 feet. That’s where Adams would also place the college standard.
“I think if we go to the NBA dimensions, we create a lot more of a free-flowing game near the basket,” Adams said. “Like it or not, what’s the most exciting play still in the game? The dunk. Think about the noise on a dunk, and the fan reaction, and the bench reaction. It has everything you would want in an entertainment vehicle. Assuming this is entertainment as well as athletic competition, let’s have it.”
One issue I’ve always had with this is it makes the low-post game even more of a fading practice. College still does have significant big men – Purdue’s Zach Edey, Indiana’s Trayce Jackson-Davis, Gonzaga’s Drew Timme, Kentucky’s Oscar Tshiebwe, Armando Bacot at North Carolina all were All-Americans this season, and Connecticut’s Adama Sanogo got votes -- in part because the NBA has placed less value on them.
“I think there’s more room for the low-post guy to operate, and it’s harder to double him at 16 feet than 12 feet,” Adams said. “And if you still want to double him, now you’re really exposing yourself.”
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4. A national approach. Currently, officials are independent contractors who work for various leagues. You will see officials work ACC games one night, Big 12 games another, Pac-12 games after that. Adams contends officiating would improve if all officiating were centralized.
The NCAA coordinator, the position Adams once held, has responsibility for assigning officials in the NCAA Tournament, but all regular-season assignments are conducted at the conference level.
Leagues currently get about $300,000 each from the NCAA for game improvement programs, Adams said, “one of which is officiating. So that’s 32 leagues getting about 10 percent of that for officiating, roughly $30,000. That’s a million dollars. Why not take that million dollars and create a centralized officiating approach? Wouldn’t the game be better if we had one consistent way to teach, way to hire, way to promote, way to manage, way to discipline and evaluate? Don’t we want the same play called the same way every night? That cannot happen under the current setup.”
Adams said this would be “revenue-neutral”.
“If you’re really serious about improving college basketball officiating,” he said, “you have to do this.”
5. Fix replay review. As it stands now, Adams calls replay review “unmanageable”. His solution is to apply “rule 11” only to the last minute of the game and overtime, except for situations that involve potential disqualification such as “a fight, or an elbow to the face.”
Currently, a decision that is close regarding whether a basketball was made from 3-point range or not can be reviewed during timeouts. “I don’t care what you do during timeouts,” Adams said. “If you want to open that up a bit more, fine. I don’t know what you would do with it, but during a timeout, nobody cares.”
He laments replay reviews that reach “confounding” lengths “to put 1/10 of a second back on the clock”. Or, in some cases, nothing happens. They got it right.
“In Division II and Division III and NAIA, there are 20,000 games played with no monitor,” Adams said. “They have a winner and they have a loser, they have complaining. But no monitor. I love going to Division III games, because I’m going home in an hour and a half.
“This whole parade to the monitor, for myriad reasons, from a fan’s point of view is intolerable. It doesn’t work. I say we start over; let’s rewrite the replay rule from scratch. What’s really important? End the game correctly.”
Adams would prefer replay reviews be used more often for “egregious” timing issues; when it is obvious a clock started late, went too long before stopping or didn’t run at all.
When Adams was NCAA coordinator, he remembers one replay review in a Virginia-Michigan State Sweet 16 game that lasted 9 minutes. He would be on board with a time limit for replays: one minute from the time the official gets to the monitor to check a play. Remember, the vast majority of officiating decisions are made in a fraction of a second.
The problem, he acknowledges, is replays still will be seen by television viewers, and when something is missed, there will be complaints.
You know what wouldn’t be missed?
Reviews that last 5 minutes even after the first angle available to viewers makes the resolution obvious.
“Fans don’t like it. Having the ability to go check all these things out is protection for the officials,” Adams said. “Can we give up some of that to expedite the game?”