NCAA, Fix It Please

From time to time, you will see myself write about rules changes I think should be made for NCAA basketball.

Yes the game is not broken by any means, but everything from your car, to your house, to your mind, needs a little maintenance. After all the most popular sport in America is pro football and they are continually tweaking the rules.

This basically is my concern with time outs in an NCAA college game. It is in need of the biggest overhaul of anything in the sport.

1. Give each team a 4 full time outs per half, period, plus one 30 second time out.  Team and media timeouts would be one of the same. I fully understand the need for media time outs, it has helped save the game, but four full timeouts per half is more than enough. Make the timeouts 2 1/2 minutes long, this serves, two purposes. 1) It gives the media plenty of time to take care of their business. 2) It would allow schools to have some really classy in-house promotions, instead of some of the stupid ones we are starting to see.

Breakdown: Media timeouts, under 16:00, under 12:00, under 8:00 and under 4:00. If at anytime during the half, the teams call timeout, this would apply as a media time as well. Example, if Team A calls timeout in the first half with 16:44 to go, that is the under 16:00 media timeout as well.

2. Do not allow teams to call time after they score a basket and do not let the coaches call timeout. Self explanatory.

To me the games are taking way too much extra time, the above might shorten things, it for sure keeps the flow of the game going and would  help with the end of the game, which has become almost boring in many situations, with extra timeouts and extra fouling. The teams can still stop the clock by fouling so that takes care of what would be a timeout.

Many west coast games are shown late enough in the east, midwest, so just shortening the game a little has to help and to me, everyone would be much happier with these simple changes, including the media.

Let me know your thoughts please, either by posting a comment or emailing at crawscorner@gmail.com

Thank you