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The night before the NCAA Division One Men’s Final between Michigan State and North Carolina I watched a Michigan State game from the past: the famous Larry Bird and Magic Johnson 1979 contest. Besides the now-ridiculous-looking short shorts (what will they say in 20 years about today’s baggy look) what immediately hit me was the terrible quality of the video tape, which looked almost as primitive as those grainy old black-and-white newsreels.
Most of all, I noticed how the game had changed. Today’s players are bigger, faster, and more athletic. With the exception of Bird, Magic and maybe one or two others, none of the players on the floor could have started for any of today’s Final Four teams. Then there were the rule changes: no 24-second clock, no three point line, no held ball rule. Dunks were rare–in part because it did not appear that many players could execute one. Many of today’s standard moves also were missing like the cross-over dribble.
What you could see happening before your eyes was Bird and Johnson changing the game from something rigid to something more fluid. The two of them were not merely the best players on the floor, but were visionaries who could see the possibilities of what basketball could become.
Too bad television seems to be stifling that vision, for the one thing that really stood out from that game was how fast it went because there were no television timeouts, no deluge of commercials that pollute today’s Final Four so there seem to be as many minutes of ads as there are of actual play.
The TV Timeout Rule
Today there are officially TV timeouts every four minutes: at the first dead ball after 16, 12, 8 and 4 minutes. Add to that the five timeouts allowed each coach and that adds up to potentially 14 timeouts a half. What is interesting is that in games that are not televised the coaches may call four 75-second and two 30-second timeouts, while in a televised game they get only one sixty-second timeout and four 30-second timeouts. That means a televised game has eleven minutes of potential timeouts per twenty minute half–or one every two minutes, which if you are a sports junkie is the most of any sport.
But those official timeouts are not the only intrusion television has made on the game. At stoppages of play such as free throws, the TV crew may decide to insert another commercial. If you have ever watched an NCAA regional or Final Four game live you have witnessed these unofficial “timeouts” when players and coaches stand around waiting for the TV people to tell them it is OK to resume the game.
The Impact of TV Timeouts
The impact of all these commercial stoppages dramatically alters game strategy. Teams that run a fast-break style or have deep benches can be penalized because the extra timeouts give the other team a chance to catch their breath. Commenting on an upcoming game with a USC team that routinely had four starters playing the entire game, Michigan State coach Tom Izzo, who favors playing as many as ten in a fast-paced style, commented on the impact TV time outs could play in the game:
So you’re getting a 21/2-minute break, and that helps.
Having a team with little depth, Marquette coach Buzz Williams had a different perspective:
I never coached in the NCAA tournament, so I’m not going to gripe about the length of the timeout. Being that we were short in size and short as it relates to depth, it’s probably a benefit to us more so than anything else.
When my son played college ball for the highest-scoring team in the country, Grinnell College, during his first year they averaged just under 127 points per game. Putting up that many points required a strategy that dictated a shot every twelve seconds, trading twos for threes, substituting players in waves of five like a hockey team, a full court press designed to force over twenty turnovers a game, and forcing the other team’s front line to cross half-court over fifty times a game.
Every player on the team was a three-point specialist with the best routinely hitting 70-80% during practice drills, so when the team went on a run it could be electrifying with threes coming at more than three a minute. I witnessed one game when they were down by double digits and all of a sudden the threes started falling at an NCAA record pace and a few minutes later the other team found themselves trailing by double digits. In another game they set an NCAA record when thirteen of their players hit threes.
Then ESPN came to town to televise a game, sparking a huge debate over whether there would or should be television timeouts. If the opposing team had a TV timeout plus a coach’s timeout during one of those runs of threes it would be like pulling a plug, taking all the electricity out of the game. Needless to say, ESPN took the air out of the ball.
The game laid an egg when it was broadcast during the hockey strike. Part of it was nervous players, part of it was it was the worst team Grinnell had in years, and part of it was a horrible shooting night. But after the game people were asking if the TV timeouts played a role in any of this.
Changing the Game for the Fans
TV timeouts not only change the game for the players, they change it for the fans. Frankly, the number of commercials during the NCAA tournament has gone beyond obnoxious, especially because so many of them are repeats. It is boring enough for those watching at home, but for those watching a game it can become unbearable as you wait for the game to resume. A game predicated on flow has been reduced to a series of stops and starts dictated not be the players and coaches, but by someone in a truck parked outside the arena.
Writing in Slate, Josh Levin points out:
Basketball has the burden of being a game of sustained energy and momentum: Take a shot, get back on defense, defend the other guy’s shot, run back to the offensive end, and on and on. Each player should be doing something—dribbling, defending, crashing the boards—at all times. The fewer the stoppages—fouls, turnovers, and especially timeouts—the closer the game is to its natural state and the more entertaining it is to watch.
Run an online search for “TV timeouts” and you will find plenty of complaints from fans forced to endure a version of March Madness where they are stuck in a perpetual commercial loop. One wrote:
Another annoying thing about TV timeouts is the common \”commercial seconds before TV timeout\” ordeal that drives me mad. There\’s 16:03 left and the coach calls timeout. Commercial. Five seconds later there\’s a stoppage in play and the under-16 timeout. Commercial. I would not only eliminate commercials when a coach calls timeout within 45 seconds of the next scheduled TV timeout, but reduce the need for those commercials to 3 (under-15, under-10, under-5).
It really sucks if it\’s a fast-paced game.
And another:
TV has caused football and basketball to resemble the Bataan Death March.
The Big Sell-Out
The game has sold out. At the pro level where there is money on the line for everyone, this might be understandable, but at the college level, the players are out of the equation. Decisions are made by NCAA bureaucrats. The money goes to support their bureaucracy and the ever-increasing lavishness of college sports. The scandal over the University of Kentucky offering Memphis coach John Calipari $31.65 million over eight years is but one example.
Asked about the Calipari tempest, NCAA head Myles Brand made the hypocritical comment:
You have to ask some very hard questions, whether this is really in tune with the academic values, whether we’ve reached a point already that these high salary and packages for coaches has really extended beyond what’s expected within the academic community.
This from the head of the organization that agreed to the TV timeout. It is also from the organization that has done little or no research on the impact of television on the game. I spent the better part of a day looking for any studies of the impact of TV timeouts on factors such as the length of games, scoring per game, the outcome of games. You would think that academic institutions would want to know whether these changes are good or bad, but it is almost as if they are afraid to ask.
A Devil’s Bargain
Television timeouts represent the devil’s bargain NCAA basketball has made with the networks–and the corporations whose commercials are the reason for the timeouts. The game Americans invented has been hijacked by big business. In addition to the TV timeout we now have commercials shown on revolving signs under the scorer’s table, the naming of college arenas after corporations, and commercials scattered in strategic places. You wonder how long it will be before players become the equivalent of NASCAR drivers plastered with commercial decals.
Basketball was never pure, as point-shaving scandals in the past testify, but to see the game sell out like it has should sadden everyone. Of course few in the media write about this because those very same media outlets also depend on advertisers who would not be happy about an article saying their commercials have ruined America’s game.
But the more pointed question is if big business can change College basketball, what else can it change about our institutions of higher learning? If the institutions themselves sell out for basketball what else will they sell out for? Most of all, what does all this say about what corporations can do to the rest of us?
2011 Update:
Was it just me or what was the worst college basketball game I have ever seen–in fact the worst I have ever seen at any level–but the the TV timeouts in this year’s tournament seemed more obnoxious than ever. It doesn’t help that by the end of the tournament you have seen the same commercials many more times than you would like.
This year what I term the NASCAR basketball court also became even more obnoxious with major corporations actually paying to have their logos painted on the floor. In one game the paint job must not have been very good because several players slipped on the logo. Those players slipping on a corporation ad is a metaphor for all that is wrong with college sports. Expect to see even more logos on the court next year.
Regarding the poor shooting on the part of both teams but especially by Butler: Stevens is hailed as a coaching genius yet he failed to make one coaching move that is in any coach’s bag of tricks– when your team is not shooting well ask to have the basket measured. This could have been done at the half. Even if it turns out to be right it often helps to refocus your team. Thinking the basket at the Butler end the second half might be off I did some stats and found no correlation between that basket and shooting in the Final Four.
What was interesting was that shooting percentages by ALL teams in the Final Four were down. Some have written in the past about playing in non-basketball domes like Houston, saying the lighting can throw players off. That is yet another example of the NCAA playing for the biggest bucks they can get. In the end, though, both teams were playing on the same court.
The corporate theme also played out in the Final Four. The water cooler joke of the week was that the real championship game was Virginia Tech against Butler since the other two programs would end up having to forfeit their banners in a few years. Bob Knight is on record as saying Calipari should not be coaching.
You see we’ve got a coach at Kentucky who put two schools on probation and he’s still coaching. I really don’t understand that.
As for Connecticut the dirt is just beginning to come out about that program. For the NCAA to even allow them to play was hypocritical. If you want to read an article that was posted just days before the final and implicated Calhoun in the scandal see Adrian Wojnarowski and Dan Wetze’s investigation. The story is a sordid tale of all that is wrong with college basketball today, especially how it has become a business ruled by agents.
The NCAA’s refusal to crack down on violations parallels the Obama’s administrations refusal to crack down on banks who are violating the Riegle-Neal Act. So in a sense this culture of looking the other way at major violations goes right to the top.
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