Good Seth Davis article on fixing College Basketball

Sports Illustrated's Seth Davis explains why the problem with low scoring games in college basketball right now isn’t the players fault, instead It’s the coaches and the styles they run.
by Seth Davis
Posted: Mon Mar. 2, 2015

On April 1, 2000, Wisconsin and Michigan State faced off at the Final Four in Indianapolis. The game was slow, grinding and physical. At halftime, the Spartans led, 19-17. Sitting in his seat at the RCA Dome, Roy Williams cringed. Not only was he the chairman of the NCAA’s men’s basketball rules committee, but he was also the head coach at Kansas, whose inaugural coach, James Naismith, had written into the game’s original 13 rules a prohibition against “shouldering, holding, pushing, tripping or striking in any way the person of an opponent.”

Williams used that game to launch a crusade for change. That spring, his committee issued a single point of emphasis for officials: Clean up the rough stuff. And it worked, for a little while. The following fall, when Kansas defeated UCLA, 99-98, in an early season game at Madison Square Garden, Williams walked into the postgame news conference and quipped, “Did you like that better than 19-17?”

A decade and a half later, Williams, who is now the coach at North Carolina, chuckles at the memory. “I caught a lot of crap for that,” he says. “It was unbelievable how many people jumped on me and said I was criticizing two coaches. That was not the point. I just didn’t believe that was what basketball was intended to be.”

The more things change, the more they ... get worse. College basketball is slower, more grinding, more physical and more, well, offensive than it has been in a long, long time. The 2014-15 season is shaping up to be the worst offensive season in modern history. Through Feb. 22, teams were averaging 67.1 points per game. That is the lowest average since 1952. The previous low for that span was set just two years ago. This more than reverses the gains that were made last season, after the rules committee made adjustments to clamp down on physical defense and make it harder to draw a charge. Thanks to lax enforcement by officials and a foolish decision to reverse the block/charge modification, scoring declined by 3.79 points per game. That is the steepest single-season drop on record.

Millions of people are preparing set their sights on college basketball for March Madness, but the sport is not ready for its close-up. All season long, there have been games where the winning team struggles to reach 50 points. Halftime scores in the 19-17 range have been a nightly occurrence. And because too many coaches use too many time outs, games become interminable during the last few minutes. As a result, this game is in danger of turning off casual fans while losing ground with the younger set, who have more choices than ever before.

“I have great concerns,” says Dan Gavitt, the NCAA’s vice president of men’s basketball championships. “The trends are long-term and unhealthy. I think some people understand the urgency of it, but there are others who think the rhetoric is sensationalized and that it’s not as bad as people make it out to be. There are enough people concerned that there is movement to get things done.”

That concern prompted the NCAA to announce earlier this month that it will experiment with a 30-second shot clock (instead of the current 35) and a bigger arc under the basket (to make it harder to draw a charge) during the postseason NIT next month. That is a hopeful sign, but the approach is still too cautious, too incremental. If we’re going to summon the requisite urgency to reverse the tide, we have to start by calling the situation what it is.

College basketball is facing a crisis. It’s time for an extreme makeover.

During his 29 years as the head coach at Belmont, Rick Byrd has established himself as one of the best in his profession. He has taken the Bruins to six NCAA tournaments, and on Jan.17 he claimed his 700th career win. Yet, the challenge of winning all those games feels small compared to the one he faces next spring, when he will convene the men’s basketball rules committee as its chairman. “I haven’t been involved with the rules committee long enough to know what other eras were like, but this has to be one of the most important meetings in a long time,” Byrd says. “I don’t think there’s any question that this gradual decline in offensive basketball is reaching a point where a lot of people think it’s just too ugly.”

The numbers tell a daunting story. Consider:

• Since 2000, scoring has declined year-to-year 13 times and increased twice. Overall field goal percentage has declined six times in the last eight seasons. Before that, it had decreased just four times in nine years.

• This is on pace to be the slowest season since efficiency maven Ken Pomeroy starting tracking tempo in 2002. That season, teams averaged 69.6 possessions per 40 minutes. This season, they are averaging 66.2.

• According to KPISports.net, points per possession are down 2.9 percent from last season, and field goal attempts are down 1.36 per game per team. Meanwhile, steals have increased by 2.7% and teams are committing 5.1% more turnovers per possession.

While no one disputes the trajectory of the data, there are many theories as to why things are tacking in that direction. Many of those theories center on two myths:

Myth number one: The players aren’t as good as they used to be. This argument holds that because of the one-and-done rule, college basketball is losing its top talent. And on the front end, the grassroots basketball culture in which young players come of age is blamed for withering skills.

That, however, does not stand up to the math. First of all, people tend to forget that before the NBA established its 19-year-old age minimum in 2005, the rule was none and done. So there are more highly gifted players in college basketball in the one-and-done era, not fewer.

Second, just 42 underclassmen entered the 2014 NBA draft. Nine were freshmen. That is not nearly enough to account for a decline measured across some 8,000 games played by nearly 4,500 Division I athletes.

While it is difficult to measure skills in different eras, especially before and after the three-point line was implemented in 1986-87, there is one category where we can make an apples-to-apples comparison, and that’s free throw shooting. The distance between the plane of the backboard and the foul line has remained constant at 15 feet. If players really are worse, then overall free throw percentage should reflect that.

Guess what: It doesn’t. In 1972, when scoring peaked at 77.7 points per game—this was without a shot clock and three-point line, mind you—teams converted 68.6% of their attempts from the foul line. This season, teams are making 68.9%. Last year’s clip of 69.6% was the highest it had been since 1979. There is nothing wrong with the way college players shoot.

Blanch32 wrote:Blame butler 2009. That's the blue print every coach of an underdog now follows.

If you want more scoring stop calling fouls that only kills the transition game and keeps everyone fresh. Including the block charge. If you can't easily tell let it go.

Herbie Green wrote:...So I don't think there is any way to "fix" college basketball. Wisconsin walked the ball up the court and got back to play tough defense. You can't really stop a team from doing that if that is how they want to play.

LooseGoose wrote:

A shorter shot clock would make them trot it up rather than walk.

Herbie Green wrote:

You see sometimes Blanch says something that makes a lot of sense.  Everytime they call a foul that means the defense gets a quick blow and gets set up to force another halfcourt grinder possession.
If they let teams play more physical they would get the running game going and wear out the opponent.

...So I don't think there is any way to "fix" college basketball.  Wisconsin walked the ball up the court and got back to play tough defense.  You can't really stop a team from doing that if that is how they want to play.

Travis of the Cosmos wrote:
I think they should play "advantage" more to borrow a term from soccer. On Sunday (sorry to use an example that went against us) Dawson bit hard on a fake on the baseline, ran into the guy and a foul was call. At the same time the guy blew past Dawson for a dunk, but a foul was called so it didn't count and Wisky had to take the ball out from the sideline since it wasn't a shooting foul. They didn't end up scoring on the possession.

Why the hell would the offense want that foul called? Why not just let the play continue and let the guy score? This kind of thing happens all the time where they call fouls that are clearly to the detriment of the person being fouled. Don't do that anymore.

tig ol bitties wrote:

In theory I like the advantage idea. In reality, it would probably drive me insane as it would put even more onus on the officials.


I'm not sure how to fix the officiating. There are ~355 DI teams. That requires a lot of officials.

One thing I would like to see is the big10 go to a replay center. No idea how it would all work logistically, but there seem to be a lot of reviews in cbb games. Would love to include all of CBB, but with so many teams, not sure how feasible it is. It would seem to be pretty easy to do for big10 conference games though. At most there are like 2 going on at a time during the year. Seems like that the reviews go quicker in other sports that use a replay center.

I like a lot of seth's ideas, but the part of the article I was surprised by was how the rules committee worked.

1 committee for all divisions? 6 D2 and D3 coaches out of a 12 member committee? stalling the arc-under-basket because of how much it would cost to paint? Working in close connection with the woman's committee? huh? why?

D2 and D3 want to follow the same rules as D1?. Fine, but they shouldn't have a say in the rules. Create their own rules committee if they don't like the direction D1 guys take it. The fact that the arc was resisted because of cost of painting it is absurd.

Herbie Green wrote:

You see sometimes Blanch says something that makes a lot of sense. Everytime they call a foul that means the defense gets a quick blow and gets set up to force another halfcourt grinder possession.
If they let teams play more physical they would get the running game going and wear out the opponent.

...So I don't think there is any way to "fix" college basketball. Wisconsin walked the ball up the court and got back to play tough defense. You can't really stop a team from doing that if that is how they want to play.

Herbie Green wrote:One thing that is never going to change is the quality of officiating. When every single call is subjective everyone has their own idea about how things should go - usually to stop hosing the team they are rooting for.

Herbie Green wrote:One thing that is never going to change is the quality of officiating. When every single call is subjective everyone has their own idea about how things should go - usually to stop hosing the team they are rooting for.

Bizarro Fletch wrote:

I disagree. I hate the NBA as a product, but watch one quarter of any random game and you'll immediately notice 1) the relative lack of involvement of the refs and 2) how consistently they get calls right. Officiating is all these guys do, and they're damn good at it.

I know there is a financial problem with making college refs full time, but with the billions of dollars at stake in the game now shouldn't we be doing better than 60 year old math teachers trying to run up and down the court with college kids and make snap judgements on calls?

Herbie Green wrote:

I don't know I see a lot of basketball at all levels down to my kids grade school and AAU games.  It is amazing the amount of abuse the refs get from the stands and most of the time people have no idea what they are even talking about.  Most of the time these refs who are at best high school sanctioned do a pretty good job IMO.  You make decent points but I have to ghink college refs are competent.  Perhaps you don't notice the NBA refs making bad calls because you don't care about the game?  Those that do have plenty of issues with "star treatment" et .