Fittingly, the last men’s college basketball we saw before the NCAA Tournament bracket graced the screen Sunday was the end of Michigan’s win over Wisconsin in the Big Ten tournament final — the needless, grinding, painful end.
Out of bounds call, review. Out of bounds call, review. Out of bounds call, review. One of them was such an obvious call that it didn’t need to be reviewed, but that’s what college hoops officials do now, they review everything. By the way, that’s their guidance, not their preference. The result is damage to a product that doesn’t need it. It took 15 minutes for the final 77 seconds of Michigan-Wisconsin to expire.
This is too much of college basketball now, and it’s too much of the discussion. The NCAA Tournament should be pure joy, from the bracket unveiling to the final snip of the net. But if you’re like me, you’ve thought about this event’s longer TV timeouts (30 seconds each), longer halftimes (five minutes) and the impact on games that at times already seem interminable.
“If you are constantly chasing increases in officiating accuracy through instant replay, then you have the potential to seriously undermine the core fabric of your game,” SEC associate commissioner Garth Glissman said.
Take heart in this: Change should be coming next season in the form of a challenge system that looks like the NBA’s, as long as NCAA rule makers realize that solution — proposed by the Glissman and the SEC — is easily the best available. And as long as coaches don’t rally too much opposition because they think too many calls will end up wrong.
That’s a failure both in logic and in vision — seeing the trees, missing the forest. Officiating will always be riddled with mistakes, just like every other human aspect of a basketball game. The game was great before replay had anything to do with it, and now it has too much to do with it. Save your challenge(s) for an egregious miss late. The conditions are the same for both sides.
The fan experience will benefit, as it has in the NBA, and that should matter to you.
Sounds simple, right? That doesn’t mean coaches will go along with it. I’ve talked to a high-major head coach who was adamant that accuracy is all that matters, game flow be darned. Glissman said he expects to face “some opposition.”
“The coaches don’t have a concern, generally speaking, with what you’re asking about,” Karl Hicks, NCAA Men’s Basketball Rules Committee chair, said on the issue of excessive reviews. “Their concern is to get the plays right.”
The committee, a mix of administrators and coaches, will meet in May in Indianapolis to discuss rules changes for the upcoming season. Rules changes happen every other year so that new rules can undergo a thorough trial period. Anything the rules committee recommends goes to the Playing Rules Oversight Panel for final approval. If wiser heads prevail, officials next season won’t have to hear constant screaming from coaches and players to review every little thing.
They won’t face their own urgency to head to the monitors in the final two minutes of each game when out-of-bounds calls can be reviewed. This was part of the equation in a truly remarkable Vanderbilt-Texas A&M finish on Feb. 26 — the last two minutes of game time took 36 minutes of actual time. Take that, Big Ten!
“What’s never mentioned with that is the number of fouls Texas A&M took (late while behind). They continued to foul, foul, foul,” said Mike Eades, the SEC’s coordinator of men’s basketball officials. “But yeah, referees want to be right and they’re following the letter of the law. Is some guys’ feel different than others? Yes, but they’re usually going (to the monitor) for the right reasons. And that’s the way the rules are written.”
Eades is right. Other things grind to a halt late in basketball games. Coaches call timeouts in bunches and trailing teams foul to extend the game and hope for free-throw misses. But that’s always been the case. It doesn’t explain why, per a study by Ken Pomeroy, average game times have increased by nearly six minutes in the past five years to 2:04:35 in 2025.
Another popular proposal to quicken the pace is to switch from two halves to four quarters — like the rest of the basketball world — which means five fouls to reach the bonus and free throws in each quarter. Right now, at seven to reach the bonus in a half, that can mean 15 minutes of free throws on every foul.
Going to a challenge system, immediately, is the easiest and most sensible fix. The NIT, which is owned by the NCAA and can serve as a guinea pig, is trying a challenge system this year in which officials can no longer voluntarily review out-of-bounds calls in the last two minutes. Coaches can challenge but will lose a timeout if the challenge fails. If out of timeouts, a technical foul can be assessed.
Glissman called the idea “well-intentioned” but wants a finite number of challenges for the whole game. He’s got a lot of experience with this. Before coming to the SEC, he was vice president of basketball operations for the NBA, and he drafted the challenge rule that went into permanent effect in 2020.
In the seasons before that, Glissman said, the NBA looked like the college game does now — constant bickering from both sidelines to review everything. The rule, which started as one challenge per game and now allows one challenge plus a second if the first is successful, has worked. One difference Glissman is proposing for the college game is no challenging of foul calls.
“Some NBA coaches, looking through that competitive lens, were saying, ‘These calls are too important, we have to get the calls right,’” Glissman said. “But in my view, that argument ignores the fact that basketball flourished in popularity long before instant replay came around. The current instant replay reviews were not ordained by God. They were created by man in recent years, and we should view them as a moving target.”
Officials will never get everything right. Same with coaches. Here’s hoping they all bring their best as college basketball takes center stage for the next three weeks, then collectively decide it would be best to sit this one out. The last thing this sport needs is for anything else to be prolonged.
(Illustration: Dan Goldfarb / The Athletic; John W. McDonough / Sports Illustrated, Elsa / Getty)
