College Basketball / Mark Heisler : It’s Not Too Late to Bring Back Good Old Days

There are a lot of wonderful things about college basketball.

For one thing, there are fewer games and fewer minutes in the games than in the NBA.

For another, college players play harder in a game that is more varied and interesting than the NBA’s, with its 24-second clock, its ban on zone defenses and its three games a week in three time zones.

The NBA is not without its advantages. It has all the best players, which counts for something.

But after a five-year reign as the new hot game, college basketball is going the way of the NBA, which bombed out after being billed as the sport of the ‘70s. College basketball TV ratings are running 23% behind the NBA’s. In 1978-79, when Magic Johnson was at Michigan State and Larry Bird at Indiana State, the NCAA ran 23% ahead.

Why the change?

--Those college coaches with half a notion that this is the 20th century knew they’d have to go to a shot clock but put it off. Most conferences now use a 45-second clock, which is not exactly an invitation to race horse basketball. It still won’t be used in the tournament.

Instead, they did manage to put in rules like the no-jump-ball one with its infamous arrow pointing this way. Now you have eight players diving on the floor for a loose ball, rolling over each other like mud wrestlers, then getting up and looking over to the scorer’s table to see who won.

No-jump was enacted after all those complaints at coaches’ meetings that the officials couldn’t throw the ball up straight. If you can’t find a referee who can throw the ball up straight, you’d better give up and go home. This is one of the best reasons I’ve ever heard for abolishing coaches’ meetings.

The rules committee also put in the new coaching box, conceived, according to one theory, to prevent Georgetown’s 6-10 towel-slinging John Thompson from scaring some official to death. I liked the old system better, when the coaches could roam all over, and point fingers in each others’ faces. Now that’s entertainment.

--Overexposure. This was inevitable. College hoops are coming from the impoverished days when they had to give the game away to the syndicators to get any exposure at all. This was coupled by the cable networks’ new needs to fill their schedules. The athletic directors just didn’t pull back in time. Since a lot of conferences are showing games without getting paid by their syndicators, the athletic directors are expected to feel the urge to pull back.

--Devaluation of the regular season. The real scourge of any new hot game, greed. The NCAA tournament has been opened to 64 teams, which makes the regular season correspondingly irrelevant. Even the Pac-10 is going to get three teams in.

Gone are the days when USC went 24-2 and went to the NIT. Gone are the days when ACC teams fought an entire season for their own league’s playoff seedings and then really went to war. Now the top ACC teams waltz each other around for four months, until the top five or six are invited to the NCAA tourney.

Suggestions: Go to a 30-second clock.

Let them keep playing zone. There aren’t enough superstar centers to go around and you don’t want every team without one automatically disqualified.

Put in a three-point line at 21 feet to put some pressure on the zones to come out from under the basket. Otherwise, the driving layup goes the way of the dodo bird and all you have is 17-foot jump shots.

Protect the driver. Make that defensive man trying to take a charge really get there first, not just fall backward.

Let a team choose between taking the ball out of bounds or shooting a free throw. The way it is now, you play basketball for 38 minutes and then confirm your victory, or blow it, in a free-throw shooting contest.

Knock the NCAA tournament back to 24 teams.

Notes More Hoosier follies: Indiana has won a few games since Bob Knight benched his sophomore, junior and senior classes at Illinois, but all has not yet returned to normality. In a victory over Minnesota, Knight jumped up and yelled at the IU band to knock off its “Socks, butt, 1-2-3, swish!” chant for a free throw by Steve Alford. The band had been doing the chant for a year and a half. Alford was over 90% with the chant. . . . Arizona is leading the Pac-10 with an average attendance of 10,326. The average Big East game is drawing 10,228. . . . Good place to start: CBS’ Billy Packer put together a video presentation to teach college players how to do interviews and deal with the press. He showed it first to Georgetown, although not because of its public-relations problems, he said. It was a lucky coincidence. Georgetown PR men routinely neglect to return phone calls. The incumbent publicist said he couldn’t tell Sports Illustrated the age of transfer student Ronnie Highsmith. . . . And from Rudy Martzke of USA Today: Packer says TV ratings mean nothing, since he’s done his own poll and found that no one watches TV bowling. Replied ABC-TV’s bowling analyst, Nelson Burton Jr.: “I’ve never heard of Billy Packer.”