The Scoring Problem

While I love men's college basketball as much as ever, I've noticed a lot of grumbling about the sport over the past couple of years.  There has been a noticeable trend of decreased scoring that seems to have a lot of people up in arms.  While I think the panic about this is overblown, it is undeniable that scoring has been trending downwards for a while, reaching a 3-point era low of 67.5 points per team per game this past season: 

It's east to identify many reasons for this (less experienced players playing major minutes, more teams willing to play at slow tempos, better focus on transition defense), but I'm not going to dig into those in this post.  Rather, I'd like to talk briefly about my opinions on a few methods that could potentially increase scoring.  I will split those methods up into bad ideas and good ideas.  The ideas that I like are not necessarily motivated by a desire for higher scoring (the decrease in scoring isn't so dramatic that I care, and I rather like defense anyway), but a desire for an even better product.

One Bad Idea

1. Shrinking the shot clock

A lot of people have made the call for shortening the college game's 35 second shot clock.  This would undeniably increase the number of possessions per game as well as the number of shots.  However, I have a number of issues with this:

- While we would get a lot more shots, there is no guarantee that scoring would increase at the same rate.  Shortening the clock may lead to more rushed looks and bad shots.  The final score would reflect the effort to increase scoring, but it may be more ugly getting there.

- We would see less variance among teams.  Currently, we can see a massive difference in tempos in tournament matchups such as Ole Miss-Wisconsin, Florida-Northwestern State, and of course, Georgetown-FGCU.  Part of the fun of such clashes in style is seeing which team is able to dictate tempo, and how the other team is able to adjust.  If we shrink the shot clock, the variance between tempos will shrink and we will likely see less offensive diversity.

- There's a fundamental difference between the high scoring teams of 20 years ago and today's teams.  In today's game, there is a focus on transition defense that has steadily grown over the years.  Watch almost any game today and you will see a majority of offensive players clear out after a shot is taken.  Since ultra-quick transition buckets are tougher to come by, we likely won't ever see a return to the extremely high pace of teams like Loyola Marymount.

Putting all this together, I'm not sure that changing the shot clock is going to change the game for the better.  Sure, it will probably add a couple points to the final score, but we need to consider much more than that when making a decision like this.

Two Good Ideas

1. Expanding the no-charge semi-circle

In last weekend's Ohio State-Iowa State contest, the second-most talked about play of the game was this charge that Aaron Craft drew in the closing minutes (1:15 mark of the video):



There was a lot of consternation afterwards about how Craft's foot was hovering above the line, which meant that the play should have been called as a block.  Most reasonable voices have pointed out how ridiculous it is to expect a ref to be able to make that discerning of a call at game speed, so I'm not going to argue about that.  What I am going to argue about is my opinion that he was still too close to the bucket for a charge to be called.  By the time Aaron Craft slid fully into place, Will Clyburn already had his left foot in the lane on his way to score a basket.  In the interest of seeing more points scored, the NCAA should probably allow buckets like that to stand.

The easiest way to swing the balance in favor of the offense would be to adopt the NBA-size semi-circle.  The NCAA has used a 3-foot radius semi-circle for the past season.  The NBA, on the other hand, uses a larger 4-foot radius semi-circle.  Making this change would change a lot of charge calls into foul calls, which should increase scoring.  The secondary and even more desirable outcome of this would be less defensive focus on taking charges and more focus on denying the penetration in the first place.

2. Changing the balance on block-charges

While I hope the NCAA adopts the above change, I don't even find it to be the most salient point stemming from Craft's charge.  To me, the bigger story about that play was that Aaron Craft was able to rush across the lane at the last possible second and still draw a foul.  Clyburn was already well on his way to the basket when Craft got in position.  If this was a one-off call, I wouldn't make a big deal out of it, but calls like this have been common all season long (just listen to Jay Bilas announce a game...any game).  I love a good defensive team, but many of these charge calls go beyond playing good defense into the realm of "sneakiness."  Instead of encouraging good anticipation and defensive positioning, the current implementation of the charge rule incentivizes trying to beat an offender to a spot.  More than anything, I think placing special emphasis on discouraging swooping in for the charge would be an offseason maneuver that would both increase scoring and make the game a little better.