After a fun and active first day of the regular season, the second day of the regular season was pretty dull. And (spoiler alert) the third day of the season will be as well. College basketball ceded this weekend to football, though it will be back in a big way on Tuesday for 24 hours of basketball, and we'll start getting into the big early season tournaments in a little bit more than a week.
Anyway, without any games Saturday that will have a significant impact, we can spend a little bit of time talking about the new foul rules:
What About Those New Foul Rules? The biggest offseason change in college basketball has been the new emphasis on stopping hand checking and making it harder for defenses to draw charges by sliding in front of driving players. The goal of the rules is to open up offenses. You can read the argument for the rules from Jay Bilas here.
This has been a pet project of Bilas's for a while now, though it relies on false assumptions. He asserts that college basketball was better in the 80s, that motion was freer, that offenses were way better, etc. That, of course, is just false nostalgia (I did a big statistical analysis on the faux decline in college hoops quality here). In reality, there's no evidence that defenses are more physical or offenses have gotten worse in the last 30 seasons. Scoring is down a little bit, but it's because paces have slowed down. Offenses have actually gotten more efficient.
The worry with these new rules is that we're going to have a deluge of fouls. And every game that had a lot of fouls immediately became a brief talking point in social media and in the traditional media. As John Gasaway pointed out, however, the teams that really had big foul problems on opening night were either teams that stink or teams that played overtime. We had a better instance on Saturday, as Seton Hall and Niagara ended up being called for 73 fouls and 102 free throw attempts in a regulation game.
In my opinion, maintaining free flows of games and not turning them into free throw contests is a lot more valuable than solving a decline in scoring of 6-7% over the last 30 years that is due entirely to declining pace rather than declining offense. But at this point, it's not clear that we are going to drown in fouls. We have to be careful not to overreact to single games, and we also have to give players, coaches and refs time to adjust to the new rules. Don't forget a few years back when the NBA passed new rules about giving technicals if players complained too vociferously about calls - we had a gazillion technicals the first two weeks and then everything settled down and we all forgot that there had ever been a rule change. So we'll have to check back on this one in a few months. We're off to a bad start on these rules, but it's too early to pass definitive judgment.
No Reason To Panic: Louisville There's no reason to be happy when a supposed national title contender is only up by 7 points over College of Charleston with a little over 5 minutes to go... even after they finish the game strong and win by 22, but I didn't think Louisville played poorly at all. They couldn't hit a shot, but every team is going to have a few games every year where there's a lid on the rim. Louisville was moving the ball well and getting good shots, and their defense was just fantastic. Russ Smith looked great, as always, and I really liked Juco transfer Chris Jones. If Kevin Ware can get back to where he was prior to his injury, Louisville is going to have a filthy backcourt.
Most Interesting Game: Manhattan 99, La Salle 90, 2OT The choices were a bit sparse yesterday. Just not a lot going on. The Jaspers overcame 30 called fouls to escape with a quality road win. Manhattan was my preseason pick to win the MAAC, and a big reason was the return of fifth year senior George Beamon, who took over with eight points in the second overtime. La Salle certainly needs to hope that Manhattan is that Top 100 team in case they find themselves on the bubble late in the season.
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