Bubble Watch: College hoops desperately needs one small fix
The sport is healthier than ever — except for the reviews
Great minds think alike. That’s what we’re going to call it. Today’s Bubble Watch intro was already planned to cover perhaps the single animating topic of the 2024-25 college hoops season, at least for fans — the kind of thing that casual viewers and friends have brought up to me as their lone remaining complaint about the state of the sport.
The basketball itself is great. The offensive numbers have never been better. The heterogenous variety of strategies and tactics remains a core strength. The talent level is super high. The calendar is in that familiar drumbeat conference rhythm, the tournament isn’t far off, and the whole culture of the game feels as fun and as vibrant as it ever has. It wasn’t always like this. Even for us die-hards, some seasons used to feel like a slog. College basketball, as a product, has come a very long way.
It just needs one more fix: get rid of the stupid video reviews.
Anyway this take was already in the hopper when Ken Pomeroy published his own Substack post Tuesday morning, doing what Ken does, which is to say bringing numbers and facts other analysts don’t have. For the past half-decade Ken has been tracking televised game lengths, and he found that the way we all feel — that games are getting longer and losing that “in and out in under two hours” watchability — is in fact backed up by the math:
The biggest problem left in college hoops is its end game. How much of a problem is a matter of taste. But for the past six seasons, I’ve been tracking game length and if you think games are getting longer, you’re correct. This is the average game length for regular-season power-conference games (non-overtime) over that time:
2020 1:59:38
2021 1:58:49
2022 2:00:33
2023 2:01:03
2024 2:02:21
2025 2:04:35As of Monday, average game time is up 2 minutes and 14 seconds over last season. That isn’t exactly significant in the grand scheme of life but it’s possibly the longest games have ever been. Because last year, game times were up 1:18 over 2023, and game times for 2023 were up 30 seconds over 2022, and game times for 2022 were up 1:44 over 2021. It’s officially a trend. Game times are up nearly six minutes since 2021.
This increase may not be entirely down to reviews — it’s possible networks are sneaking in a few ads here and there, or teams are taking longer to break huddles during timeouts at the margins — but, also, let’s be real: it’s totally about the reviews.
How many games have you watched this season? How many of them have had their best and most exciting and most high-leverage sections totally hollowed out by minutes-long reviews? How often have you found yourself pulling out your phone in what should be the most compelling part of any game? It’s the worst! Players stand on the sidelines waiting for verdicts. Coaches get out the clipboards and start overloading their guys with info. Home atmospheres go dead. Officials stare into a screen and rotate some knobs and talk to each other and take what feels like effing forever to figure out even the most rudimentary, obvious, you-had-it-right-in-the-first-place-and-didn’t-need-to-listen-to-the-player-who-told-you-to-go-to-the-monitor calls.
A few weeks ago, we were telling friends that one of the reasons we loved college basketball as a viewer — much like soccer — is that the games go by quickly. You’re not committed for an entire afternoon. The windows are pretty tight. One responded by agreeing in theory but noting that college games were getting longer, bleeding into each next televised event more and more, and that they couldn’t stand the deadening ritual of endgame video reviews. It was hard to argue.
The reviews have to change. A challenge system that limits each team to one review or two — and that forces a coach to burn a timeout if he gets it wrong — seems like a fix so obvious and so agreed upon by consensus that it’s the kind of fix the NCAA men’s basketball committee could adopt pretty quickly and without much fuss. (It is something the committee is already considering. It will test a challenge for out-of-bounds calls in the final two minutes of 2025 NIT games, the kind of NIT-based experiment that has often preceded subsequent rules changes — though not always.) You could quibble on the details of the new system, on how restrictive it should be. What really matters is that the sport wriggles out of this self-imposed trap. Constant, infinitely possible trips to the monitor — trips that corrode atmosphere, take fans out of the game, and increase viewers’ time investment — have to stop.
(European fans complain loudly about VAR stoppages, and have begun to push back against the technology in some organized ways in around the continent; imagine showing those folks crunch time of your average Big Ten game. Their heads would explode.)
People still levy a lot of big-picture complaints about college basketball, particularly around transfers and NIL. But those structures, in addition to being fairer to the kids, have also had a fundamentally positive outcome on the product. Teams are older, more talented, less stuck in rebuilding cycles, more easily rejuvenated. European players can make good money in the US while getting more direct NBA exposure. Even if you wanted to change all of that (or the forthcoming direct payments to players by schools) those kinds of reforms would be super hard — not to mention subject to the abstract and ever-shifting whims of the local and federal lawmakers and judges.
This is something the NCAA can change quickly and easily, with a simple rule, to make fans happier and an already thriving sport better. It should.
The usual housekeeping:
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There are almost certainly typos in the below copy. We are our only editor; this is a one-man show. If you spot factual mistakes or just think we should consider a team not on the page, get in touch in the comments or shoot me a note.
NET and SOR are always current as of the previous day. Records are always up to date. Thanks as ever to Warren Nolan for his immensely helpful site.
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