The NCAA rules committee proposed a bevy of changes Friday afternoon, with an overarching goal of improving scoring and pace of play in college basketball.

One of the proposals is to cut the shot clock from 35 to 30 seconds, a change that Syracuse head coach Jim Boeheim has vouched for in the past. And while Boeheim has been clear in wanting a 24-second shot clock that mirrors the NBA, shaving off five seconds is a step in that direction — even if it’s just an experiment.

“I don’t know whether I should say this or not, but I told the guys in the room that if this is the rule for the next two years, there’s nothing in concrete that says that college basketball doesn’t find out that this isn’t a good thing and you go back to 35 seconds,” said  Rick Byrd, the chair of the NCAA rules committee and head coach at Belmont, on a teleconference Friday.

“I don’t think you have to keep going down if it’s not right for the game.”

Of all the rule changes — which also included provisions to timeouts and the restricted-area arc, among other things — the shot-clock change was the most talked about on the teleconference. Byrd called the shot-clock discussions “the most compelling time” in his four years on the committee, and that committee members had varying opinions on the shot clock.

Byrd also said that a survey saw 60 percent of coaches in favor of reducing the shot clock, which had some bearing on the final proposal.

“We don’t think it’s going to cause a huge bump,” Byrd said of how the shot clock could affect scoring and pace of play. “We think it’s part of the puzzle that helps us get the game headed in the right direction.”

On the call, Byrd responded to the possibility that teams use a full-court press to make half-court possessions even shorter. He said the committee discussed the possibility of team’s using “soft presses that slow the ball down,” and that’s when he admitted that this change may not prove to be a long-term solution.

As for going as low as 24 seconds — which Boeheim firmly called for in October — Byrd addressed a question of why the NCAA doesn’t try and model itself after the leagues its players are aspiring to play in. Byrd was steadfast in maintaing college basketball’s own identity, and said the committee is always looking for ways it can improve.

“I don’t think the goal of college basketball is to prepare people for different types of game afterwards,” Byrd said. “College basketball has its own identity, and I think part of what we tried to do was draw from the good rules of other associations at times and borrow those rules and use them, and we looked at a lot of them.

“… college basketball is a great game and there are a whole lot of people who like it better than any other form of basketball.”

After a year filled with heavy scrutiny, a proposed change to the shot clock and other areas of play hope to keep it that way.

Published on May 15, 2015 at 3:58 pm

Contact Jesse: jcdoug01@syr.edu | @dougherty_jesse