For as long as I can remember, my main sports interest in the winter and early spring has been college basketball.
I know that having such a passion for college hoops was a function of my environment. With my earliest memories coming in the early-to-mid '90s, and having a father who graduated from Duke, college basketball became a very natural love.
But beyond that, with my mother having graduated from Winthrop, who would become a mid-major power in the late-'90s and 2000s, and with Charleston, South Carolina, being my hometown and living there during some of College of Charleston's best years, I grew up enjoying all of Division I college basketball.
For at least the last decade or so, part of my morning routine has included checking all of the previous night's scores, whether it be the Pac-12, Big West, Southern Conference, or SEC. And at least a couple times a week, especially once we got into this part of the season, I'd check every conference's standings. After all, I wanted to know who the teams most likely to make noise in March when the stakes were the highest.
But in recent years, I've felt the passion start to wane. No longer did I feel like I wanted to watch games on any night of the week if I was able, and I checked scores much less often. Now, in this season, I don't think I've checked the results of every game from around the country once since December. I'm not at all aware of what power conference or mid-major teams might be on the bubble as of now.
In short, I've followed and watched college basketball less this season than in any season since I was about 9 years old.
There are some people who will tell you that complaints about the state of college basketball are nothing new. And to an extent, that's true. However, the sport has reached what has to be a tipping point.
This is the slowest season on record by pace, and one of the lowest-scoring seasons, with no signs of that trend coming to an end any time soon. In general, with teams averaging about 65 possessions a game, and about 1.01 points per possession, as per Ken Pomeroy's renowned data, it seems as if many games are simply down to who scores 60 or 65 points first.
In 2015, it seems like about 70 possessions per game is the standard for a team playing fast. Those teams are about two standard deviations above the nation's average, which in layman's terms means they're in the top 5 percent of the country when it comes to playing fast. In 2002, the first year of Pomeroy's database, teams averaged about 70 possessions a game.
Of course, pace is not synonymous with quality. A simple fix for making games faster would be to cut down the shot clock to 30 or 24 seconds. If not implemented with other changes, cutting down the shot clock would be pointless, and might make a sport where players have increasing trouble making shots even worse.
The NCAA, for all of its numerous faults, does have a nice archive of past NCAA tournament games up on YouTube, which means we can get a decent look at how the game was played at the highest levels in past years. Let's start with the classic 1992 Duke/Kentucky game.
Admittedly, this is merely regarded as one of the greatest start-to-finish games in the history of the sport. But if you watch any number of possessions, you can see that players are very free to move, ball handlers aren't hand-checked, interior defenders aren't overly physical, and there aren't really any absurd hijinks off the ball (the Christian Laettner chest stomp on Aminu Timberlake aside). In one passage I watched, Len Elmore argued for a foul being called that wasn't. To my eyes, it simply looked like what would be normal play in 2015.
Let's fast forward to 2000, and the Michigan State/Florida national title game. It's a bit more physical, but players are still given freedom of movement, and the game flows like a game of basketball should.
Then, look at the UConn/Kentucky championship game last year. You can hardly go a possession without seeing grabbing and shoving down low, cutters getting held or shoved, or screens that go beyond the letter of the law. This type of behavior has continued into many of the biggest games this season.
College basketball should have cleaned this up years ago. In the first half of last season, officials emphasized some of these types of should-be fouls at the beginning of the season, before abandoning everything being emphasized because too many people whined about too many fouls being called.
Officials need to keep emphasizing those rules throughout a season, even at the risk of a 70-foul NCAA tournament game. Eventually, players and coaches will get the point, just like they get used to a more passive or whistle-happy official from game to game. Then the officials should come back the next season, and emphasize even more rules, completely through that season.
College hoops also suffers from far too many stoppages in play. With five timeouts at a coach's disposal each game, and four (lengthy) media timeouts each half, a normal college game can have nearly 20 stoppages. This for a sport which is undoubtedly at its best when there's a rhythm and a flow to the game.
I still maintain that you need second bachelor's degree to completely understand all the minutiae of NBA timeout rules, but the fundamental principle in those rules that keeps the game moving is that timeouts get taken away from teams if they haven't taken them by a certain point in a game. And some timeouts, if taken early in halves or quarters, take the place of media timeouts.
This isn't exactly rocket science, and it could both keep the game moving and sell about the same number of ads. It shouldn't take Duke and St. John's two hours and 15 minutes to play 40 minutes, when the average 48-minute NBA game is about that same length.
However, while my personal preference for college basketball has diminished, my passion for the sport of basketball has not. I've found myself watching more NBA games this season. In the pros right now, there are loads of likable teams and stars, games are extremely entertaining, and overly physical play gets whistled while teams can still maintain a defensive identity.
It wasn't always like that. As recently as the mid-2000s, the NBA suffered from a lack of offense, too much physicality, and too much individual basketball. It cleaned the game up, and a generation of largely team-first stars has helped make the NBA as enjoyable as it's ever been.
College basketball can get back to being an enjoyable product once again. It has to make changes for the better soon, or it risks becoming even more unwatchable.
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