Brian Spurlock-USA TODAY Sports
Michigan State Spartans coach Tom Izzo seemed to shock the world last week when he talked about shortening the time on the shot-clock. With college basketball being very-low scoring as of late, many thought Izzo’s idea was brilliant and wondered out loud of how we have not thought of such genius ourselves so much sooner.
Izzo’s idea is a fine one, although it only addresses part of the major underlying issue for the sport — college basketball is broken.
Don’t get me wrong. I still enjoyed this past season as much as any human in the country. Despite all the flaws in the game, the regular season gave us tremendous finishes all year long. But ignoring the the issues in the game while only praising good spurts of basketball is not going to help the problem.
Between the “best” players only required to play one year in college, coaches not trusting their players and making them eat up the majority of Izzo’s hated shot-clock and referees swallowing the whistle on everything but charges, college basketball needs plenty of fixing.
Izzo is right about something though, starting with the shot-clock (something relatively small) can help evolve the game past teams running the weave for 30 seconds near the middle of the court.
Everyone acted like Izzo reinvented the wheel when he made the suggestion about changing one rule because he carries around enough cache that if he says something, it must be important. More coaches like him need to speak out about how to fix the problems within college hoops.
Far too often, all we do is complain about what is wrong, but offer no solutions on how to fix them (like I’ve done here). Izzo is not a superhero for his ability to speak his mind, but I don’t see a lot of other folks with his stature offering suggestions. So yeah, I guess he is superhuman after all.
Joe is a Senior Writer for Rant Sports. Follow him on Twitter @JosephNardone
