Still more replay? Especially after no March Madness, college basketball should know better

Sometimes it seems as if college basketball just can’t get out of its own way. Or maybe its keepers just enjoy trying fans’ patience.

When it comes to understanding what makes college hoops special, what most of its fans want, and just what makes for a quality product, those setting its agenda regularly appear tone deaf to the max. The sport urgently needs better, especially given all of its off-the-court foibles, of which we’ve only seen still more of this offseason.

The transfer epidemic has become a joke, no matter how many try to rationalize it. Any doubt it was out-of-control ended soon after the COVID-19 virus shut down the season. At a time when most anybody with a pulse froze and then proceeded cautiously during a period of unprecedented uncertainty, the first reaction for hundreds of athletes and their families/handlers was to shop around for their next AAU, er, college program to latch onto.

It’s only a small part of the mess. Coaches poaching players from others’ rosters act as slime and cowards-no excuses. Ethics continue to apparently have no place in the sport, even as the fallout from the simmering FBI scandal is still lurking, and schools continue to embarrass themselves on that front, too. It would be nice of just one of these bastions of preparing leaders for tomorrow to be able to disagree with infractions findings respectfully, instead of acting like petulant children pitching a fit.

Tiring as it is schools claiming they never know anything or yet another player declaring how much they love their current school immediately before announcing their transfer, it’s matched by how this sport just can’t stop tinkering with its rules, and almost always for the worse.

The latest on that front came last week, when the NCAA Men’s Basketball Rules Committee proposed allowing officials yet another reason to use instant replay. The committee wants to allow referees to go to the monitor on plays where it calls possessions dead due to a shot-clock violation. If refs think there’s a chance they ruled a play dead when they shouldn’t have, then a possible basket that was wiped away could be restored.

According to the NCAA’s release, “committee members think an error of this kind could lead to a game-winning or game-losing field goal being wiped away,” so it is considered an issue of the “integrity of the game.” Thus, the need for a rule update in what is otherwise a non-rule change year.

It’s not that this would necessarily be a titanic sea change. It may not come into effect every game. In theory, officials would only choose to use it in the stickiest of situations.

The red flags nonetheless go up. The implication appears to be that replay is a positive in the sport right now, something it is doing right. And if replay is good, then even more is better.

That couldn’t be further from the truth. Replay is not something college basketball does well. Most of the time, one wonders if it could be done much worse. It is drudgery and a pox sapping game flow, and rarely provides a fix worth its time.

Way, wayyyy before adding more of it, the rules committee’s focus should be on fixing replay first. A one-minute limit on any review should be a no-brainer. If there isn’t enough evidence to overturn after a minute, clearly it’s not obvious enough to need to change. Rather than fix blatant errors, the current approach has oft seemed that officials go to the monitor looking for reasons to change a call, which couldn’t be more misguided. It makes the end of games unwatchable, far more than fouls and free throws.

The negative effects of replay, and recent college basketball rule changes in general, were never more apparent than in March, when we didn’t even have live basketball.

With no NCAA Tournament this year, television networks turned to classic NCAA tourney games from the past to fill air time. It was enjoyable reliving some great moments, but it was also much more than that.

The games should’ve been required viewing for caretakers of college basketball. Games like North Carolina State-Houston in 1983 or Villanova-Georgetown in 1985 are the sport’s equivalent to the literary classics anyway, stories that should be consumed and studied by all. But if current influencers watched them with a critical eye this March and did some compare and contrast, it should’ve been staggering.

The difference in the product then and now is massive. Those games had constant movement without the ball. Regular cutting and screening away from the ball. Limited dribbling. Bank shots. Finger rolls. Three-on-two fast breaks with players filling the lane, rather than running to the three-point line. Mid-range pull-ups on the break. Triangle-and-two defenses. Full-court presses.

Also, to counter those today who can’t stop dreaming of ways to legislate more shots or scoring into the sport: try to find one person who thought N.C. State’s win over Houston in 1983-where neither team scored as much as 55 points-was boring.

There are many reasons why the 80s and even into the 90s is recalled as a golden age for college basketball, and it’s not just the individual talent. College hoops had style. Analytics may not like all those mid-range shots (which usually went in, by the way), but the game was so much richer than the current all-or-nothing, home run-or-strikeout game of jacking threes or driving head down to the basket. Anyone wondering how to make the game better needs to be examining footage from the sport’s heyday. One might go as far to say they’re derelict in duty if they don’t.

Pertinent to the discussion of replay is the fact that the game was infinitely cleaner and easier to watch than it is now. There weren’t stoppages for replay review to look at how hard a foul was, to check the clock after every basket in the final minute, or to see if officials could find a reason to reverse an out-of-bounds call.

Free-flowing is among the foremost annoying, overused basketball buzzwords of the current times, not unlike ‘dribble-drive’ or ‘positionless.’ But if one wants to really talk free-flowing, college basketball then was it. Even the ends of games were much smoother, and that’s notable because even at that time people complained about the drawn-out end of games. It was peanuts compared to the present, when no five-minute delay can be passed up if it can add another two-tenths of a second to the clock.

College basketball needs less replay, not more. If it can’t fix the mess replay is right now, then perhaps it’s time to rid of it altogether. That may sound extreme, but the video in March didn’t lie. We wouldn’t be missing near as much as we might think.

If the rules committee really feels the need to tinker, perhaps it can look at some radical ideas on how to curb the three-point shot’s outsized place in the sport now.

It’s safe to say the three was never intended to make up over half of teams’ field goal attempts, as it does now for some. Even if they aren’t launching from deep, almost every team now plays almost entirely off the three-point line. The do-si-do around the arc frankly makes the sport look more like Olympic team handball than basketball, with players only going inside the line if they’re going to make a headlong bonsai dive to get as close to the basket as possible.

Perhaps it’s time to create a new form of three seconds, putting a one-third court line in 30 feet from the baseline, and make it a violation if an offensive player is caught standing between that and the three-point line for more than three seconds at a time. Maybe that will curb the stand around offenses with “spacers” standing in corners for long periods of time, and perhaps temper the tedious, never-ending diet of ball screens.

There’s room to make changes and even be innovative. Given how beloved its not-that-distant past is, though, when it comes to rules and shaping the game, college basketball should be drawing on that past before making moves in its present.

Unless it is looking for ways to agitate its fan base even more. In that case, carry on.

Twitter: @HoopvilleAdam