College Hoops -- The Slowdown Continues

Bill James had a long piece in one of the Abstracts/Baseball Books on the premise that strategies in all sports tend to evolve toward defensive domination because coaches and management feel defense is more controllable, I.e. More dependent on personnel selection and strategy, and most coaches in all sports tend to focus more attention to defense.
Thus, he continued, most leagues (notably the NFL and NBA) would attempt to counter these tendencies with rules changes designed to facilitate offense.

The recent swing in college football toward high-powered spread offenses would be an outlier to this trend.

 

Control freak coaches, yes, and the likes of Dickie V. to slurp every one of them. It's about the players, dammit.

 

Love this idea and doing something with timeouts so that the final 60 seconds of some games don't drag out for 20 minutes.

 

The one rule I would like U.S. basketball to adopt from FIBA is that timeouts are called by the coach who goes to the timekeeper to get the timeout. The timeout is called at the next timeout scores. I hate it when timeouts are called because a team can not in-bound or get caught in a trap call timeout. A timeout should not be an option to bail out of a tough situation. I really don't understand why this ash not happened yet.

In a perfect world I would allow one timeout a half. A team could use it to move the ball as in the NBA from the back court. But is a team uses it before the end of the half then they lose the opportunity. Bunch the commercials at the four minute breaks. If this rules leads to suspicious rise in the number of injury timeouts then don't allow the injured player in the rest of the half.