As we near its two-month mark, what is one to make of the 2019-20 college basketball season?
We know there are no dominant teams to this point, for better or worse. There are great players, contrary to many in the sport’s Ronnie Raincloud media, but it is true that a number of them are injured or otherwise inhibited, or many just don’t know about them. (Though just because Obi Toppin and Jordan Ford don’t play at Duke or Kentucky doesn’t mean fans shouldn’t be catching their games or talking heads can’t sing their praises…)
There have been plenty of upsets, at least in ranking at the moment the games happened. It’s entirely possible that more than a few of those rankings just weren’t very accurate, and a host of teams have not been worthy of the lofty expectations (see: Florida early season, Maryland at the moment, and we’re still watching you with a skeptical eye, Louisville). Heck, maybe only 10-15 teams deserve to be ranked this year. Still, when Evansville can win at Kentucky, Stephen F. Austin can take down Duke in overtime at Cameron Indoor Stadium and top-ranked squads are falling left and right, it’s easy to see how the theme of this being a season of upsets has emerged.
There are a couple other stories that need to be kept tabs of, though. Because while it gets beyond tiresome listening to another in the sport complain about the NCAA or whine yet again about how college hoops just isn’t the NBA, that doesn’t mean there isn’t room to be critical.
And some have been. Earlier in December on a Monday, respected ESPN analyst Fran Fraschilla noted on Twitter that “College hoops is off to a slow start. Many games stink.” Fraschilla’s belief noted in the same tweet was that a loss of talent was a main cause, and also that the “longer three-point line has exposed average shooters and made games uglier.”
Veteran announcer Tim Brando chimed in, saying: “I’ve seen a couple of clunkers, but also a fun game or two. However from 30,000 feet the sport is in trouble!” Brando also had a number of other thoughts, among them the start date of the season being too early, and also that college basketball has allowed the NBA to dictate the sport way too much.
That same day, Seth Davis of The Athletic noted there has been a significant dip in scoring this season, this coming on the heels of a drop last season as well. Davis referred to the drop in scoring-again-as “an unsettling reversal” and “a troubling early trend worth monitoring.”
Maybe one person noting such things is an accident and two is a coincidence, but three is a pattern.
We’ve tried to hold off from the topic, in order to give it a fair shake. We warned of unintended consequences before the sport’s mass 2015 rules overhaul, were vocal about what we thought should be added and not, and were largely critical of the rule changes when they passed.
The sport was generally OK the first four years of those new rules. Scoring was up the first three years, and for those advocating for changes, that really was all the validation needed for them. Even if there were warts, let’s be honest: few are going to notice or care when points as a whole were up and we get championship games like last year’s to finish the NCAA Tournament, or a Cinderella run like Loyola’s in the 2018 Big Dance.
The 2019-20 season is exposing cracks in the sport’s foundation, though. Some are issues that have been developing for a number of years. Some have crept back in after being suppressed for a while. Some are recent.
Add it all up, though, and Tim Brando is right: college basketball as a whole has some problems right now.
Some will disagree with that, and it should be noted: to comment on the sport as a whole is not to ignore the fact that there have been some exciting games. Stephen F. Austin’s win at Duke was an all-time upset, the highest of drama down the stretch and not that far off in significance to a Chaminade beating Virginia in 1982. Evansville’s stunner over Kentucky was a terrific story. A few tourneys (Maui, Myrtle Beach) had excellent championship games. There have been some wild finishes. (UNC Greensboro has been snake-bitten with not one but two losses on halfcourt shots at the buzzer) Nobody is saying there haven’t been some good games.
To Davis’s point about scoring being down, though, it’s impossible to deny that there have been an increasing number of way-low scores, and we’re not just talking about Virginia.
Back in 2015, we noted a particular Wednesday night block of games that was dominated by low scores. That was back under the old 35-second shot clock. Yet, if one looked at halftime scores of top 25 games the Saturday before Christmas-with the 30-second shot clock-here is what they would’ve found:
South Florida 31 Florida State 28
Kansas 23 Villanova 23
Tennessee 30 Jacksonville State 26
Texas-Rio Grande Valley 27 Texas Tech 26
Butler 26 Purdue 21
Auburn 27 Lehigh 20
San Diego State 29 Utah 19
You can find similar almost any full day of play this season so far. The thing is: this is a new (re-) development. We did not have as many of these scores the past several years.
Per the NCAA’s statistics, scoring for Division I teams is down from 73.8 points per game in 2017-18 to 72.7 last year and 72.1 this year as of Dec. 29. This is just December, and while some of these results are conference games, many of them aren’t. The trend will likely continue downward; scoring typically drops when guarantee game home cream puffs have been all gobbled up and conference play gets into full swing.
It’s not just scoring, either. We’ve seen too many highly anticipated games turn out as flops. The much-ballyhooed Champions Classic on opening night was loaded with turnovers and sloppy play. Louisville and Michigan’s top-five showdown, North Carolina and Virginia’s top-10 battle, Arizona and Baylor’s top-20 duel, Purdue and Virginia’s Elite 8 rematch are just a few games that carried appeal and then delivered a lump of coal.
What’s going on?
First off: the longer three-pointer has unequivocally had an effect, probably more than most expected.
The length of the three never was going to keep teams from shooting it, not in the era of ever-increasing reliance on analytics. Furthermore, some shooters in recent years have had no qualms firing from 25, even 30 feet out, so it was easy to think a modest increase in the line would have little-to-no effect.
It certainly has thrown a monkey wrench in the conversion rate, though, which is down almost a full percentage point (from 34.5% to 33.6%, per NCAA statistics). Whether it is exposing shooters or is just taking some adjustment in muscle memory after years spent shooting from a given distance, there certainly are an increasing number of bricks being thrown up.
Just as big of an issue has been the decline-again-of freedom of movement. After a few years of keeping the paws off, the eyes say defenses are again getting more and more physical, and are being allowed to do it. Free throw attempts are down (almost one per game, per NCAA stats), and the number of fouls are down, too. And as much as people don’t enjoy seeing whistles, it must be understood that there is a direct correlation: when physicality is allowed, scoring goes down.
Here’s another hypothesis, though: all of college basketball’s rule changes in recent years trying so hard to become a replica of the NBA or FIBA-and that includes the lengthier three-pointer-are taking their toll.
If we’re being honest, style-wise college basketball is now essentially NBA Lite. What that means is a sport that is much different from the free-wheeling, running-and-gunning game that so many fantasize about every time they dream up their next rule change trying to duplicate the pros.
A dirty little secret about the NBA is that it is actually a halfcourt-heavy league. There are occasional runouts, yes, and athletic freaks like LeBron James or Giannis Antetokounmpo make them look really cool. Most offensive play is in the halfcourt, though, where most everyone is running ball screens or isolation plays.
That’s what college basketball has become-a whole lot of NBA play-a-likes, all but mandated by the rules. Except those play-a-likes are coming without NBA results.
As scoring slips, these eyes are seeing that there’s no other way to put it: offensive play has become horribly stale and boring.
Variety on offense is essentially gone. Almost every team’s offense now is now based on non-stop dribbling and the ball screen. The sport was going that way under the 35-second clock, and now four years into the 30-second clock, it is about complete.
Ball screens are more prevalent than seagulls on hot dog wrappers on the beach. For a lot of teams it appears they’ve become THE offense.
There’s a ton of dribbling and a ton of standing around. There’s hardly any cutting. If there is, it comes only in brief bursts in a set play, before players go back to standing around. Many offenses do feature “spacers,” one of those buzzwords many love that is actually slang for players standing around in corners, watching a 3-on-3 game going on in front of them, hoping to receive a pass after their defender helps on yet another pick and roll.
Offenses have all the complexity of Cheerios. There is almost no screening away from the ball, with players that could be screening and cutting instead standing around as those ballyhooed spacers. As if Henry Iba, Bob Knight or John Wooden’s offenses never had spacing with four or five players in constant motion.
Then there is the effect of analytics, preaching that teams shouldn’t even think about shots that aren’t three-pointers or layups and another trickle down from the pros. Offenses now run a do-si-do at the three-point line, almost as if they’re afraid to step inside it unless they do so at full speed, driving recklessly to the basket hell-or-high water. Some can champion how smart it is. If shots aren’t being made at a high rate, it’s also often really, really ugly.
Mix it all up in a 30-second shot clock pot that is just six seconds longer than the NBA’s 24 seconds, and what would you expect? Shrinking shot clocks have limited the ways teams can play, so of course this is what you get.
College basketball could badly use some rule changes that actually encourage some imagination, instead of so many in recent years that have stifled variety in a sport that used to be filled with it. One place where the rules committee has gotten it wrong in recent years has been in shrinking the shot clock, and if anything in its mass of changes in 2015 it should’ve lengthened the shot clock back to the 45 seconds that it was from 1986-93.
It’s counter-intuitive, for sure, scaring to death those who think every team would just burn more clock, but a longer shot clock would actually give room for some sorely needed variety that the current shot clock does not.
A 45-second shot clock would allow for the return of the true motion offense, an offense with five men moving and plenty of screening away from the ball and-here’s the key part-working for a shot. It’s an offense that has been all but legislated out of the game. A few teams run some form of it, but it’s not easy, and their success is often based on having pro-level end-of-shot-clock closers (see: Texas Tech, Virginia 2019) much more than wearing a defense down with movement.
Under the current 30-second shot clock, offenses have essentially a max of about 12 seconds to break a defense down with motion, and now thanks to silly and unnecessary new shot clock reset rules, even less after an offensive rebound or some fouls. Once the clock gets under 10 seconds, teams go to their end-of-shot-clock offense, which is either a ball screen or an isolation play.
Given the time constraints, it’s no surprise teams have just decided to teach the ball screen and spread people around the three-point line than to put in a system. There is next to no room for much else, unless someone thinks jacking even more three-pointers from further distances is innovative. (It’s not.) When rule changes are limiting what should be perfectly reasonable options for play, then they’ve gone too far, and the continued shot clock reductions have done just that.
Without motion offenses and with short shot clocks restricting the ways teams can play, the art of offensive play has disappeared. Perhaps that lack of creativity on offense has affected defenses, too.
Defenses now essentially default to half court man-to-man. Few use zone, and most that do are less than imaginative with it. The box-and-one, triangle-and-two, full-court press-good luck finding much of them anymore. Even full-court man pressure defenses are rare. It’s not an exaggeration to say defenses have become as homogenous and dull as offenses have.
Of course, there’s not much reason to pressure when rule changes have basically neutered defense. The elimination of the five-second call on dribblers continues to be maybe the single worst rule change of the too many that were implemented in 2015. A rule that encouraged dribblers to either do something or get rid of the ball was repealed to allow guards to now pound, pound, pound away as much clock as they want.
It provides a quick thrill on the occasion that a Markus Howard or Carson Edwards is in the zone. Most of the time it’s just a snooze-inducing way to brick a shot.
In short, Tim Brando is right again: college basketball has allowed an NBA infatuation to dictate its rules way, way too much. The result is a sport that used to have an identity in style is now severely lacking one.
All this isn’t to say college basketball is dead, and those who suggest as much are being borderline hysterical. (The recent meltdown about James Wiseman leaving Memphis early being yet another example) As long as the NCAA doesn’t allow the NCAA Tournament to be fouled up by overly greedy major conferences who will destroy anything in their path to get another dollar, the sport has its bell cow.
The caretakers of the sport should be taking a critical look at it, though. Despite all it has done trying to rig more points into the game, scoring is going down yet again, and dissatisfaction with the product is starting to rear its head again. Rule makers also need to be cognizant of the role of analytics wringing dry much of the character of the sport, the way they have done in making baseball nigh unwatchable for so many.
Most of all, though, at some point those in charge need to realize that perhaps college basketball’s greatest success comes when the sport looks less like the NBA, not more.
