Hot Stakes – Rule Changes are Killing College Basketball

Kris Jenkins’ miraculous three-pointer at the buzzer, which gave Villanova its first national championship since 1985, will go down as one of the greatest moments in NCAA Tournament history and it capped off three weeks of absolute madness. If the only college basketball you watched this year was the tourney, you’d think the state of the game had never been better. There were a flurry of fantastic finishes and arguably the biggest upset in March Madness history when Middle Tennessee State stunned Michigan State.

But all that excitement was only a temporary mask for the floundering state of the game.

College basketball is now a billion-dollar industry, which has folks making decisions completely driven by finances. These business decisions may produce gigantic short-term profits but they are slowly destroying the integrity and quality of the on-court product.

The game is now rigged for high-major programs and new rules give additional advantages to more athletic individuals – i.e. the top-ranked recruits who don’t give a second glance to the George Masons and Wichita States of the world. Team basketball is still taught by many of the great Division 1 coaches but it is no longer celebrated or rewarded at the end of the season.

The NCAA put an increased focus on limiting contact from the defender this year. It wasn’t a rule change, per se; the rule is the same, but the NCAA wanted it enforced more strictly. They were aiming to create a more free-flowing game with more scoring. But stricter enforcement also makes it harder to guard and promotes one-on-ones and isolation plays because it’s nearly impossible to stop great offensive individuals if you can’t put a body on them at all.

The subjectivity of the rule also caused havoc. Officials each have their own interpretation and the inconsistency of calls from game-to-game has been mind blowing. It’s unfathomable to watch kids play in back-to-back tournament games which are officiated so differently. This issue was far worse in the 2014-15 tournament but is still problematic.

In an attempt to make the game more like the NBA, the NCAA reduced the shot clock from 35 seconds to 30 this year. More and quicker possessions give teams with superior athleticism an even bigger advantage. The kids who can create shots for themselves are more likely to thrive with a shorter shot-clock. It encourages the trend toward the one-on-one game, while penalizing more deliberate and methodical offenses. (Sorry, Tony Bennett.)

Obviously these games are important and getting the call right is paramount. But why in the world does it take so long? We can all see it immediately. If the official can’t tell right away, let the call stand. There’s no reason for the game to grind to a standstill while the officials and teams huddle. It creates an unnatural game flow – counteracting the other rule changes – and produces bizarre results. If you really want to the correct call to trump all other considerations, then put another official on press row with access to replay. If a call is incorrect, he can quickly blow his whistle and overturn it. We don’t need three officials to look at a tiny monitor for five minutes. If it’s that close, play on! It worked for 100 years before this nonsense.

This is a pure and obvious money grab. Seven more minutes of commercials equals seven more minutes of the players sitting around. Why is the $tructure and environment different for the most important games?

Valparaiso and Monmouth deserved to be in the tournament. Syracuse did not. The Orange caught some breaks in the bracket and played their best ball of the season, advancing to the Final Four. But it’s tough to examine any set of power rankings and argue that the Orange deserved an invite, let alone a no. 10 seed. Until recently, the committee has done a reasonable job of choosing and seeding teams, but the process is now driven more by money and politics than ever before.

UNC earned a trip to the title game by defeating no. 16, 9, 5, 6, and 10 seeds, while Syracuse didn’t belong in the tournament in the first place. But this gripe isn’t about what they did on the court; it’s about what their performances off it. Orange coach Jim Boeheim was suspended nine games this season for his role in NCAA violations and academic fraud at SU. Meanwhile, UNC coach Roy Williams and the Tar Heel program are under an NCAA investigation for major academic fraud. The program is expected to be punished this offseason. Little attention was given to the scandals while the NCAA and national media was celebrating Cuse and UNC winning in March.

Despite all power and influence favoring the most talented teams, there’s been an ironic trend for the past three seasons: the national champs have not been the best teams. UConn (2014), Duke (2015), and Villanova (2016) all had incredibly quick and athletic backcourts and each was the beneficiary of subjective officiating; they were allowed to aggressively defend at crucial times. Strictly enforced “freedom of movement” rules would likely have produced different results in the Final Four match-up between UConn and Florida (2014), the Sweet 16 showdown between Duke and Utah (2015), and to a lesser extent this year’s Elite Eight match-up between Villanova and Kansas.

The ’85 team is considered a great cinderella story but it was actually an excellent team The Wildcats played in the nation’s top conference and battled with no. 1 Georgetown (lost by 2 and 7) and no 2 St. John’s (lost by 2, 5 and 15) all season long. Five of their ten losses were competitive battles with the best teams in the nation. Nova’s starting five still rattles off the tongue of college basketball fans 31 years later.

The team dubbed “Danny and the Miracles” is probably the worst team to win the title in the modern era. Despite their deficiencies, the Jayhawks had the best player in the nation (Danny Manning) and a Hall of Fame coach in Larry Brown.

Mike Krzyzewski’s first championship team was considered a long shot when it stunned UNLV in the Final Four. The Rebels were considered the greatest team in college basketball history while the Blue Devils were given little respect. Duke proved it was no fluke by repeating in ’92 and is still thought of as one of the greatest all-time teams.

In 29 years, these are the three champions which weren’t necessarily thought of as great when they won the title. Now we’ve had a three-year run with questionable champs.

It’s hard to be critical of the sport after such a great championship night. Villanova’s epic battle with North Carolina will not be forgotten. However, if we look past the fantastic ending, we see a sick game and, for whatever reason, a championship night which is no longer rewarding great teams.

 

In sum, college basketball is heading to an ugly place and it may have already reached its destination.

(Photo credit: Luis Blanco (flickr) [https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/legalcode].)