The NCAA men's basketball rules committee proposed several rule changes Friday afternoon designed to speed up the pace of play—making the game more exciting and less dependent on physical play.
Among the biggest changes proposed were a reduction in the shot clock from 35 seconds to 30 and an adjustment to the number of timeouts each team is permitted, dropping down from five to four.
The Playing Rules Oversight Panel will convene via conference call June 8 to vote on whether or not the proposed changes become official.
The shot clock change was the most anticipated rule change after the NIT experimented with a 30-second clock this postseason, with the general theory being that a shorter clock will create more possessions and more scoring. The shorter clock brings men's college basketball in alignment with women's college basketball—which already uses a 30-second clock—and closer to the NBA's 24-second clock.
The proposed changes to timeouts would also allow just three timeouts to carry over into the second half, preserving the use-it-or-lose it timeout if the number of timeouts is reduced to four—currently a team that does not use one of its five timeouts in the first 20 minutes loses one of them at halftime. The committee also recommended that timeouts called by teams within 30 seconds of a scheduled media timeout—the first dead ball after four-minute intervals beginning with 16:00 left in each half—would become a media timeout. That rule would not apply to the first team timeout of the second half if used before the first media timeout.
Additional changes proposed by the committee focused on contact in the post. The restricted circle—a relatively new concept in college basketball after it was adopted from the NBA—could be extended by somewhere between a foot to four feet. The committee also supported giving offensive players the principle of "verticality" and gave a generic recommendation for "strict enforcement of defensive rules."
Players could also face penalties for flopping.
After utilizing the NIT's shot-clock experiment as a data-gathering system for Friday's proposal in 2015, the committee would allow the 2016 NIT to allow players six personal fouls before fouling out—the magic number in the NBA—instead of the usual five.
Referees could also have to re-calibrate their timing, as the committee proposed eliminating the five-second violation for a closely-guarded player with the ball, as well as not resetting the 10-second limit to get the ball past halfcourt if the offensive team calls a timeout in the backcourt to avoid a violation.
A less serious rule change—enabling players to dunk during warm-ups—was also proposed.
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