basketball timeouts are awful

a condensed schedule might mean more minutes for Zeb Jackson [Marc-Gregor Campredon]

Previously: Part One

Don't forget to check out part one before diving in. There'll be a part three(!) next week addressing all the questions about next season and beyond.

Schedule Stuffing

Yesterday, Phil Martelli told Matt Norlander that the Illinois game will not be played as scheduled, while the Wisconsin game scheduled for February 14th is up in the air. This morning, Brendan Quinn reported there's "good momentum" going for the UW game to occur as scheduled.

Michigan has played nine Big Ten games. If the Wisconsin game goes on as scheduled, they'll have six games left on their original slate and five postponed games to make up. There's going to have to be some shuffling of the original schedule to get every game in because there isn't enough space:

Date Opponent Days Between Games
Feb. 14 at Wisconsin
Feb. 18 Rutgers 3
Feb. 21 at OSU 2
Feb. 27 at Indiana 5
Mar. 4 Iowa 4
Mar. 7 at MSU 2
Mar. 10-14 Big Ten Tournament 2

You can maybe jam three games in there. Meanwhile, this is what's left to make up:

Home games: Illinois, Indiana, Michigan State

Road games: Penn State, Northwestern

The NCAA doesn't seem to be moving off its planned tournament dates, which means the Big Ten Tournament is supposed to end, as usual, on Selection Sunday. If you keep the tournaments in place and also try to get every game on the schedule, you end up with, well, what you'd expect when trying to cram 11 games into a period of 24 days. This is just an example and definitely not a suggestion:

Date Opponent Days Between Games
Feb. 14 at Wisconsin
Feb. 16 at Northwestern 1
Feb. 18 Rutgers 1
Feb. 20 Illinois 1
Feb. 23 at OSU 2
Feb. 25 at PSU 1
Feb. 27 at Indiana 1
Mar. 1 Indiana 1
Mar. 4 Iowa 2
Mar. 6 at MSU 1
Mar. 8 MSU 1
Mar. 10-14 Big Ten Tournament 1

Even before taking the ongoing pandemic into consideration, anything along these lines is going to be a ridiculous schedule to ask college athletes to maintain. If the above isn't an option—and I won't, at this point, put anything past anyone involved in sports decision-making—then the conference has three choices:

  1. Don't make up all the games. I have no idea how the conference would determine which games to reschedule, or whether each team would play the same number of games, or how a champion would be determined if they don't play the same number of games across the board. Given we're probably not done with postponements, aiming for 16 games per team seems reasonable—that'd be slotting one extra game onto M's schedule, ideally Illinois since they haven't played yet.
  2. Cancel the Big Ten Tournament. I'd rather see the league crown a regular season champion without running its players ragged than have a conference tournament this year. That week can be reserved for a late flurry of makeup games instead. You can even get Michigan back to the full 20-game schedule by making a couple adjustments in the intervening month. It's still a tight squeeze but it's not a full month of one-day turnarounds.
  3. Do the football plan. In other words, don't have one! Roll with the current schedule, maybe make up a game here or there if programs are able to work it out on their own, and figure out how you're awarding the regular season title hopefully more than a week before it's over. I don't actually hate this in the case of basketball because (1) they've smartly not made any promises about awarding the title that they can break this time and (2) the teams should all have at least played enough games that going by win percentage won't produce a horribly unfair champion.

As you may have guessed, I'm in favor of option two, perhaps with a bit of option one mixed in depending on the number of postponements this month.

No matter what, Juwan Howard is going to need to be careful navigating the end of the season. I'm guessing we'll see a fair number of minutes for Austin Davis, Brandon Johns, Terrance Williams, and Zeb Jackson, and maybe a some additional tick for Chaundee Brown, as the team tries to avoid playing anyone too many minutes after the long layoff—you don't just worry about rust but also soft tissue injuries after a period of inactivity.

[Hit THE JUMP for how the layoff may impact performance, which elite teams to avoid in the tourney, the numbers behind Leigha Brown's absence, and the quarters versus halves debate.]

oh the uconnanity [Bryan Fuller]

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Please do not mention the Star Wars. Results will be unpredictable and depressing. If Star Wars comes up try to change the subject to something like Michigan… uh… baseball? Hockey and basketball recruiting?

Bleargh. Michigan canceled a home and home with UCLA for this:

The University of Michigan Athletic Department announced Thursday (Jan. 30) the addition of the University of Connecticut to the non-conference football schedule in 2022. The Wolverines and Huskies will meet on the gridiron during the third week of the season, Sept. 17, 2022, at Michigan Stadium.

That completes a nonconference schedule of Colorado State, Hawaii, and UConn. The home schedule adds Maryland, PSU, Nebraska, Illinois, and Indiana. I really don't understand why Michigan had to cancel UCLA when they already had 7 home games. Not a great look for Warde Manuel.

Welcome to the revolution. John Gasaway on timeouts:

That's even more draconian than my proposal, which would allow timeouts if a coach shears off one of his digits and hands it to a ref. (Or, in more extreme cases, delegates an assistant to do so.) Hopefully he moderates his views slightly going forward.

[After THE JUMP: Kobe King takes are bad]

MICH_TENNESSEE[1]1396059944018-19-NCAA-fen[1]

They did call this, but no one knew why or how

You guys! I'm super pumped that I wasn't the only one spasming at the injustice of it all when someone—anyone—tried to take a charge last year. Obvious charges were blocks. Obvious blocks were blocks, except sometimes you got a hilarious charge call off an obvious block despite the new charge-hating regime. John Beilein muttered about it politely, and I was reverse Otto.

Turns out that everyone hated it, and now the NCAA is (probably) rolling the change back, because everyone hated it. Here is the realtalk reason why:

Byrd said NCAA national officiating coordinator John Adams and other officials conceded that the upward motion element made it “nearly impossible to teach (officials) how to call it and it was nearly impossible to call it with any consistency.” …

…"It just was very difficult for an official, and a defender for that matter, to know when [that happened]. The great part about when he leaves the floor, it’s really the only definitive act, the only definitive instance an official can determine. And the upward motion was subjective.”

Amen. Even if you want to reduce the viability of the charge as a defensive strategy, you have to do it in a black and white way. Personally I've never felt charges were out of control. If I was NCAA God I'd conjure forth a flood to wipe away the face of the association, and then afterwards I'd leave charges pretty much as they are with two exceptions:

  • It's automatically a block if you take the contact when the player is on his way down. These kinds of calls evaporated last year due to the rule change but may come back now that they're rolling it back. If you can't close enough while the guy is still going up, it should be a block, as impeding a guy's landing is dangerous and you didn't really play defense if the ball has been gone for a beat or two by the time you make contact. Any play that a ref would award a bucket and then an offensive foul should be an and-one.
  • Flops are fouls. Simulation should be penalized as it is in soccer and hockey. Note that trying to take a charge is not simulation. The event against Tennessee above is definitely Jordan Morgan trying to take a charge. It's not simulation since Stokes ran him over with his shoulder down. Morgan is in a precarious position if Stokes does not and may end up falling over if he guesses wrong, in which case he should get called.

The new guideline:

In order to take a charge, the alteration will require a defending player to be in legal guarding position before the airborne player leaves the floor to pass or shoot. Additionally, the defending player is not allowed to move in any direction before contact occurs (except vertically to block a shot).

Improvement, certainly. Even so I'd simplify way you make the determination: if you get plowed in the chest while square and moving perpendicular to (or away from) the guy with the ball it's a charge. A lot of people are still bitching about the Morgan call against Syracuse because they've seen it in super-slow motion and in that Morgan is not dead still the entire time. As long as a guy isn't leaning or moving into the defender (and he gets there when he' still on the floor), it should be a charge. Make it as easy as possible to call. If this is too charge-friendly, extend the circle to NBA dimensions and ruthlessly call floppers.

But whatever, man. I'll take it. As far as impact on Michigan goes: it's a positive for anyone who relies on positioning and smarts over being the Sultan of Swat. So thumbs up.

The rest of the basketball rules chattering went well, at least from my perspective: it sounds like they're going to try to wrest a single timeout away from coaches and are pondering this change:

Committee members also recommended an experimental rule involving timeouts, with an eye on potentially using this in the Postseason NIT. In this proposal, when a team calls a timeout within 30 seconds of the next scheduled media timeout (first dead ball under the 16-, 12-, 8-, and 4-minute marks), that timeout will become the media timeout.

Yes, please.

Meanwhile, there wasn't much support for widening the lane or reducing the 35-second clock. Widening the lane is increasingly pointless in today's shooting-heavy game; shortening the shot clock without reining in zones and making everyone an NBA player leads to more ugly shots and little else.

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RIP TO DA NIX

The one other thing that seems like maybe a big deal are a series of changes to (or at least increased emphasis on) various aspects of post play:

A defensive player pushing a leg or knee into the rear of the offensive player shall be a personal foul on the defender;

Is this not already the case?

An offensive player dislodging a defensive player from an established position by pushing or backing in shall be a personal foul on the offensive player;

This is the most extreme change, and it's hard to see it getting called. Backing a guy down is a time-honored tradition. Meanwhile, preventing that is some advanced defensive juju that remains possible—Morgan managed it very well. Suddenly removing that from the offensive guy's arsenal severely limits his ability to do much unless the post feed puts him in a spot he wants to shoot from.

This seems like the kind of rule that gets called a ton early in the season, gradually evaporates in the second half, and then is quietly rolled back.

A player using the “swim stroke” arm movement to lower the arm of an opponent shall be charged with a personal foul;

Okay. If I am interpreting this correctly they're emphasizing that the off arm can't be used to bat away hands when a guy tries to get a shot off. Hard to see this getting called much even when it happens since refs are trying to track 30 other things. It's unclear, though. Do defenders do this?

Post players using hands, forearms or elbows to prevent an opponent from maintaining a legal position shall be charged with a personal foul.

This seems like a point of emphasis thing on something that's already an foul, and that cuts both ways.

Unlike the offense-friendly hand-check changes of a year ago, these seem slanted to the defense. The one change obviously in the offense's favor seems way less impactful than removing the ability to back a guy down. If my read is correct those changes are pretty good for Michigan, which posts up about twice a season. Meanwhile, Wisconsin is probably thrilled with all of this.