College basketball is going to look drastically different next season.
Aside from all the new players, transfers and coaching changes, the NCAA Playing Oversight Panel announced on Monday that it has approved a package of rule changes that will go into affect during the 2015-16 college basketball season.
Included in these approved rule changes are reducing the shot clock from 35 to 30 seconds, limiting timeouts, changing media timeout procedure and the use of replay for those that fake fouls, or in layman’s terms, flop.
Before getting into some of the other rule changes being looked at, we’ll look at these big ones.
The shot clock
First, the shot clock. Critics have said that the 35 second shot clock is far too much time and encourages slow, methodical play. Teams that use this to their advantage are programs such as Virginia. While reducing the shot clock by five seconds will surely add possessions to the game and create better pacing in the game, it just encourages the use for zone defense.
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Every team in college basketball has zone defense in their arsenal though not everybody uses it as their base defense.
Syracuse has always been a zone defense team and Baylor has established it for themselves recently, but zone has seemingly died out a bit, especially at the higher level of college basketball with coaches looking to help their players get to the NBA and NBA teams don’t play zone.
What this reduction in shot clock time does is open the door for teams to establish more zone defense, which would just slow the game down that much more. At the college level, especially when going against a very quick and effective zone, it takes teams a solid 20 seconds to dissect the defense to get the shot they are looking for.
Even then, you see frequently forced and erratic shots, which limits the ability to score unless you have three or four 40 percent three-point shooters, which most teams don’t have.
On paper and in theory reducing the shot clock would work out well, it just makes teams focus more on defense than before because there is less time to set up a basic man-on-man defense.
It’ll be interesting to see if how many teams actually do stick with man defenses now that the zone defense is going to be so much easier to run and allow you to save some legs for offense, which is the point of the shot clock change, but this could very easily be more of a problem than a solution.
Timeouts
The idea here is to reduce the number of timeouts from five to four for each team and only three are allowed to transfer over to the second half rather than four. Included in this idea is that if a team timeout is called within 30 seconds of the up-coming media timeout, that timeout would be considered the media timeout.
To simplify, there’s a media timeout at every four-minute interval of each half, so at with less than 16, 12, eight and four minutes, a media timeout is taken. If a timeout is called by one team at 8:30, that will be considered as the media timeout as well.
Before this change, if a timeout was called at 8:01, the media timeout would then come at the next dead ball, which could be three seconds later, resulting in about three straight minutes of dead ball time with just three seconds of play in between.
Another small aspect that will actually make the most impact is removing the coach’s ability to call a timeout while the ball is live, leaving it for the players to have to make the call.
The media timeout policy is the one that needed to be changed and they have addressed that.
Anti-flopping measures
Since the NCAA can’t fine players for flopping like the NBA does (well…you know what, let’s not get into that), looking to penalize players in-game for, as they put it in the release, “faking fouls” is a nice addition though I’m not sure how much play it’ll actually get.
Two of college basketball’s biggest offenders of foul faking, Frank Kaminsky and Tyus Jones, are no longer in college so this rule feels a little late on that end. However, while this is another rule that’s good in theory, it’s likely just going to turn into something that slows the game down.
Think about how much flopping or at the very least overselling of fouls that comes with every game. If the refs decide to review all of them, that’ll just delay the game, allow teams to have unintended timeouts and cause more outrage over the pace of play.
We’ll see what this approved rule actually becomes, but I highly doubt it becomes anything of note.
Other changes
Other rule changes that are being looked at and have been approved include: being able to review potential shot clock violations throughout the entire game and not just in the final two minutes of each half (I’m calling this the Kentucky rule), eliminating the five-second closely guarded rule (this is never actually called so there’s really no point to this) and removing the prohibition on dunking in warmups prior to the game and at halftime (prepare for pregame dunk contests, something that’ll be lighting up Vine next season)
While all of these rule changes have their place, it’s hard to see all of them having their intended impact not the game. Scoring is probably on going to see much more of a bump because zone defense is going to become huge for teams. Even if the scoring does increase that’s going to make zone defenses even more inevitable, so if the scoring does increase, it likely won’t last for long.
The timeouts will take some getting used to for teams and coaches. Players will need to be more aware of the timeout situation and we could see some more Chris Webber-esque brain farts because of it.
What we’re looking at here is a great example of doing too much. There’s a lot of changes here and doing all of them at once seems like overkill. Rules have been changed frequently over the last three years trying to establish better play but these are all happening in rapid fashion.
We could see an increase scoring and the pace could be better, but we’re looking at a lot of changes that will certainly take some getting use to for everybody: fans, media and teams. We’ll reevaluate at the end of the year, but we could see that these rules are for the worse rather than the better this time next year.
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