More on NCAA rules, sorry I just can't do baseball yet

The NCAA rules committee came out with their recommendations and they did not include the change to the 35 second clock. This pretty much means that the clock will remain at 35 seconds for another season. The proposed changes are outlined in Eamonn Brennan's column.

The best suggestion in the article is not from the NCAA committee, but from Brennan himself regarding timeouts. Basketball has too many. There are already official timeouts at each 4 minute mark, do we really need many more?

The rule change to 5 timeouts a game instead of 3 per half was sort of a move forward, but it hasn't helped. Since teams lose a timeout at halftime if they don't use it, teams often use one at the end of the first half to set up a play rather than lose it at halftime. This is totally unnecessary and slows down the game.

Teams also don't need to have 4 timeouts in the 2nd half. They already get one every 4 minutes, why do we need to have a half of basketball with potentially 8 team timeouts plus the 16, 12, 8 and 4 minute timeouts.

Brennan brought this up because the NCAA committee proposed to expand the ability of refs to review plays to the last 2 minutes which will slow down games even more. I'm OK with the extra review as long as there is an NFL like time limit on the review, but there should be fewer timeouts.

In the NBA there are 82 games and a need to make that huge number of games as competitive as possible so they entertain. The NBA allows a team to move the ball to half court after a time out to get an advantage in end game situations and allow teams a better chance to come back. NCAA games don't allow the movement of the inbound, so the only real advantage is to set up a defense after a made basket. I don't think getting rid of timeouts will lead to a ton fewer steals on inbound plays, as teams usually just foul anyway. Just think if teams only had 1 or 2 timeouts at the end of games. Fouling slows down the game enough, do we need all the time outs?

I also think the foul out timeout needs to go. Why should a team get to huddle and talk to the coach just because a guy fouls out. If the coach needs 30 seconds to make a decision about a sub, why does he need to huddle with his players to do so.

I'll stop bitching now.