Fittingly, the last men’s college basketball we saw before the NCAA Tournament bracket graced the screen Sunday was the end of Michigan’s win over Wisconsin in the Big Ten tournament final — the needless, grinding, painful end. Out of bounds call, review. Out of bounds call, review. One of them was such an obvious call that it didn’t need to be reviewed, but that’s what college hoops officials do now, they review everything. By the way, that’s their guidance, not their preference. The result is damage to a product that doesn’t need it. It took 15 minutes for the final 77 seconds of Michigan-Wisconsin to expire.
This is too much of college basketball now, and it’s too much of the discussion. The NCAA Tournament should be pure joy, from the bracket unveiling to the final snip of the net. But if you’re like me, you’ve thought about this event’s longer TV timeouts (30 seconds each), longer halftimes (five minutes) and the impact on games that at times already seem interminable.
If you are constantly chasing increases in officiating accuracy through instant replay, then you have the potential to seriously undermine the core fabric of your game, SEC associate commissioner Garth Glissman said.
Take heart in this: Change should be coming next season in the form of a challenge system that looks like the NBA’s, as long as NCAA rule makers realize that solution — proposed by the Glissman and the SEC — is easily the best available. And as long as coaches don’t rally too much opposition because they think too many calls will end up wrong.
That’s a failure both in logic and in vision — seeing the trees, missing the forest. Officiating will always be riddled with mistakes, just like every other human aspect of a basketball game. The game was great before replay had anything to do with it, and now it has too much to do with it. Save your challenge(s) for an egregious miss late. The conditions are the same for both sides.
The fan experience will benefit, as it has in the NBA, and that should matter to you. Sounds simple, right? That doesn’t mean coaches will go along with it. I’ve talked to a high-major head coach who was adamant that accuracy is all that matters, game flow be darned. Glissman said he expects to face “some opposition.”
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