Anyone with the effrontery to suggest improvements for Division I men’s college basketball in 2024 should begin with the welcome elephant in the room. The game is flourishing. Arguably it’s never been better.

Scoring is up because efficiency has increased markedly. Back in the aughts when “points per possession” first started to be bandied about online, it was a notable occurrence to run across an offense clocking in at 1.07. Now the major conferences collectively score points at that rate in league play.

The change to the block/charge rule this season has been a spectacular success. Offensive fouls per game have declined from 3.7 in 2021-22 to 2.2 this year. Turnovers are down significantly across D-I. Scarcity in giveaways means abundance in points. Ours is truly a golden age of shot volume.

Many fans of the game clamored for reform on this front, often in anguished posts on social media. Then the NCAA stepped in, made the change, and suddenly the issue has subsided drastically. Now everyone can promptly set about finding other things to complain about, like for instance there being too many timeouts. Be that as it may, the new block/charge rule has been a triumph. Take a bow, NCAA.

Players are more skilled, likely older, and certainly way more international than ever before. The most reliable intergenerational performance metric of all is free throw accuracy, and it just keeps climbing skyward. In 1948 men’s college basketball players collectively shot 59.8 percent at the line. Conversely in the next few years the entirety of D-I could be shooting a previously unheard of 72 percent.

Watching more college basketball than any non-professional in my acquaintance has never been more pleasurable. It is therefore in the spirit of perfecting a near-perfect and already beautiful game that the following suggestion is offered.

We should reduce the number of timeouts. This wasn’t always an issue, but the situation has changed dramatically in the last decade. In a laudable and actually quite successful pursuit of justice we transformed the closing minutes of close games by introducing official reviews. Unfortunately, this is also the precise stage of the contest for which coaches hoard their timeouts.

The result is 60 seconds of game clock that can consume 20 minutes of our lives. This combination of allotted timeouts and end-of-game reviews is the once simmering and now boiling water and we are the frog. We should have jumped out long ago.

If we traveled in time from 10 or 12 years ago to sit down and watch a game today, we would be absolutely thrilled by the first 38 minutes. Then we would claw our eyes out over the last two. We should do the patient and continuous work required to accelerate reviews even as we reduce timeouts at one stroke and as soon as possible.

Reviews are a recent innovation, but the humble and ubiquitous timeout wasn’t always what we see today either. Up through the Second World War timeouts were called solely so players could rest.

There were of course no media timeouts. Players didn’t even go to the bench during breaks in the action. They stayed on the floor, strategized with teammates, and caught their breath. Occasionally teams attempted to use their conditioning to force the opponent to burn through all their timeouts. Prior to losing to Holy Cross in the 1947 NCAA tournament, Navy head coach Ben Carnevale called timeout just five times over his team’s entire 18-game season.

Then in 1947-48 the Big Ten adopted an experimental rule on timeouts. Players were now allowed to go to the sideline, sit on the bench, and receive instructions from their coach. Notre Dame commonly followed Big Ten rules during this era, and that season Kentucky came north to play a road game against the Fighting Irish.

UK coach Adolph Rupp was shocked by what he saw when his counterpart Moose Krause called the first timeout. Notre Dame’s players came to the bench, sat down, and listened intently to their coach. Rupp’s Wildcats stayed out on the floor as they always did. Kentucky lost, and the Irish extended their home win streak to 38 games. Saint Louis was the next opponent on the schedule for Notre Dame, and Rupp was quoted in the national press warning the Billikens about this bizarre new tactic being employed in South Bend. The Big Ten’s rule on timeouts was adopted nationally the following season.

Over the following decades two developments occurred. Regularly scheduled media timeouts alleviated the need for rest breaks timed at the coach’s discretion. At the same time the very presence in the arenas of these rights-owning media conglomerates magnified the perceived importance of trying to put a ball through a hoop. Coaching salaries exploded, coaching staffs swelled like family-owned businesses, coaching searches became its own field of professional specialization, and coaching terminations came to require vast numbers of lawyers. There are considerable sums of money at stake, therefore by any measure this must be a very important activity.

Where we seem to have gone badly awry is in the belief that we must reflect this importance in multiple coaching tutorials during the contest itself. Possibly this is the legacy and cultural spillover of college football, where coaching autocrats proliferate and the necessity for a decision on each call from scrimmage throws open an irresistible window for meddling. But basketball, thank Naismith, is very different, or at least it should be very different. Paradoxically enough, multiple in-contest coaching tutorials dampen the value of the contest itself purely as a media commodity. Importance is its own enemy.

We may find we don’t need multiple in-contest coaching tutorials. It’s possible that in place of a lecture in the huddle coaches can come up with a hand signal for “Go to a 1-4 set and let our leading scorer play hero ball.”

One of the best anecdotes I heard when I talked to members of Mike Krzyzewski’s first Duke team from 1980-81 was the time his two best players ignored their 34-year-old coach’s instructions completely coming out of timeout at the end of regulation against North Carolina. And it worked.

Basketball is at root a simple sport, and it’s telling that international audiences puzzled by baseball or American football have long grasped Naismith’s brilliance at a glance. What we want is the flow of the beautiful game itself. We demand justice too, of course, and we’ll tolerate reviews in pursuit of that ideal. But the ancient enemies of flow are free throws and timeouts.

The NCAA has done magnificent work in fostering a high-scoring version of the game without resorting to the crude expedient of adding free throws. We should finish the job and reduce the number of timeouts. When we do we’ll wonder what took us so long.