NCAA tournament games are taking forever and ruining March Madness
By: CHRIS CHASE
If you’ve been watching March Madness and wondering if you’re seeing more commercials and sitting through longer games, you’re not crazy: NCAA tournament games are longer than their regular-season counterparts and, as a result, have become nearly interminable. Even the classic Kentucky-Notre Dame had its flow killed by stoppages. In the final 8:13 of the game, there were eight timeouts. EIGHT! Absurd.
During the regular season, teams are granted one 60-second timeout and four 30-second timeouts per game, which is far too many TOs in the first place. The first timeout called by either team in the second half automatically becomes a full timeout. There are also the TV timeouts, which occur at the first dead ball after the 16-, 12-, 8- and 4-minute marks. With those timeouts, the recently-created review of out-of-bounds calls in the final minutes of the game and the regular injuries, long free-throw routines and timeouts that stretch a little longer than usual, college basketball is threatening to turn into baseball: a game only the die-hards can sit through.
But for as bad as it is in the regular season, the NCAA tournament is infinitely worse. Teams have the same five timeouts, except their lengths are reversed: four 60-second timeouts and one 30-second timeout. The first timeout of the first half also becomes a full media TO. Each media timeout lasts considerably longer than the regular season — from about 90-120 seconds up to a maximum of three minutes in the tournament. Halftime is officially 20 minutes, five minutes longer than the regular season, but stretches to 21 or 22 minutes sometimes, which is good because it’s always enlightening to hear Charles Barkley discuss players whose names he only learned that morning. Then come the replay reviews, which seem to be far more frequent in the tournament. It’s unbearable. Strictly based on timeouts and halftime alone, a tournament game can be 15 minutes longer. And that’s without counting the more deliberate play near the end of these games. The last five minutes of the Duke-Utah game took 35 minutes. That isn’t good for anybody.
So how big a problem is this? Very, and it’ll get worse every year. More commercials gets CBS/Turner paid and they pay enough in rights fees that they should try and make some money back. But at some point will losing viewers outweigh the ad money? With attention spans getting shorter every year, people want to watch the flow of a the beautiful sport, not five separate mini-games, each with their own mini-halftime. And, in theory, if the games go faster and viewership goes up, the networks can charge more money for ads.
So please make a change, NCAA. Do it now before it’s too late.
