Ask college basketball fans what their biggest gripe about the current state of the game is and the most common response would overwhelmingly be about the transfer portal. (Understandably so.)
But if you narrowed down the parameters to on-court issues, the No. 1 culprit would almost certainly be tied to the plague that is the parade of in-game reviews that bog down suspense and suck the drama and urgency out of too many games. Fortunately, we have some positive changes on the way. The NCAA announced Tuesday that its men’s basketball Playing Rules Oversight Panel “approved changes to help enhance the flow of the game” for 2025-26.
The key alteration: Coach’s challenges are coming to college hoops. (Twirl those index fingers in celebration!) Starting next season, any out-of-bounds call, basket interference/goaltending call and/or block/charge whistles in the restricted arc near the rim can be challenged at any point in a game by a coach — with a catch. A coach (and only a coach) can ask for a monitor review if his team has at least one timeout remaining. Each coach is allowed one review at the start of each game and will be given one bonus review if the first challenge is successfully overturned.
An unsuccessful review will result in the loss of a timeout.
This, in theory, should help eliminate some reviews, but it’s not as though they’re going away. College basketball is probably still going to have too many reviews and those reviews are probably going to be a net negative on the product. Tuesday’s vote is a half-measure.
It downgraded a huge problem into a big one. But big is still problematic.
An abundance of tedious monitor reviews isn’t solely a college basketball nuisance (the NBA has its fair share of suffering as well), but it would have been nice to see more ground covered. Officials don’t need to be checking for minuscule game-clock discrepancies outside of, say, the final 15…
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