While it’s been an issue that has bubbled up in college basketball circles for years, it seems there’s finally an appetite for change.
That issue, of course, is how the end of games are administered from an officiating and replay review standpoint. As anyone who has watched this year’s March Madness tournament knows, the final two minutes of games often come to a screeching halt as officials use replay review as a crutch to look at anything from out-of-bounds decisions to whether or not there should be a tenth of a second added to the clock.
Luckily, one postseason competition is implementing a rule to address this nonsense. The Fox-run College Basketball Crown tournament, which begins Monday, is introducing a rule that will limit replay reviews in the final two minutes of games.
According to Fox Sports college basketball announcer John Fanta, who will be calling the competition, any debatable out-of-bounds call in the final two minutes of a game will require a coach to call a timeout in order for the play to be reviewed. Under normal NCAA rules, any out-of-bounds call in the final two minutes of a game can be reviewed at the officials’ discretion.
Here is exactly how the rule will be administered, per Fanta:
“Rather than officials arbitrarily going to the monitor on any out-of-bounds calls in the final two minutes of a game, any debatable call will require a coach to utilize a timeout to then challenge the call. There is no limit on coaches’ challenges, but if a team does not have a timeout and loses the challenge, they are charged with an administrative technical foul, meaning the opponent is given two shots and will keep the basketball. If a team is successful in their challenge, they keep the timeout that they used to challenge the play.”
This is just the type of reform that college basketball needs. The end of college basketball games have become largely unwatchable. Between reviews for out-of-bounds and reviews to adjust the clock, fans spend far more time watching referees look at a monitor than they do watching actual basketball being played.
The change should also be good for competitive integrity. Far too often, teams with no timeouts remaining are bailed out by officials looking at the monitor for a call that had no business being reviewed.
Hopefully, the College Basketball Crown won’t be the only competition to implement this sort of rule change. Something needs to be done to fix the end of college basketball games, and you can be sure that the NCAA will be keeping a close eye on how this experiment goes throughout the next week.
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