SALT LAKE CITY — It’s like walking a tightrope, finding the right balance between getting a call right, but not making the game unwatchable. Video reviews can kill flow. Of course, everybody hates reviews until their team loses an NCAA Tournament game because of a blown call.
“I think the answer to that is yes [we need them], meaning the importance of getting the play right is critically important, especially at the end of the game,” J.D. Collins, the NCAA’s national coordinator of officiating, said in a phone interview Saturday. “If you make a call with 13 minutes left in the game, players can adjust and make up for the error on the play. But if you get down to the last couple of minutes in the game, have a critical play that can have a major impact on the game, I think there’s a benefit to it.”
Though it may seem like the delays are longer this year, the data is similar. Through the first round and First Four of the tournament, there were 68 reviews in 36 games, according to Collins. The average time of a review is 42.69 seconds, up slightly from last year’s NCAA Tournament average of 41.90 seconds. Of the 68 reviews, four have gone over two minutes, and have all involved the game clock or shot clock, making sure the correct time was in place.
“While it would tell me that we have had a couple more lengthy reviews, we’re probably a little quicker on the simple things,” Collins said.
Kansas coach Bill Self raised an interesting point regarding the end-of-game reviews. If a team is without a timeout, they can end up getting one as the officials look to get a call right.
“So from a strategic standpoint, a late-game [situation], it certainly comes into play and that is one of the unintended consequences I believe of the reviews and the delays,” he said. “You give a team an extra timeout that didn’t have one, or you allow a team to have to defend something when they wouldn’t have had a timeout to put something in that second.”
But with that said, the most important thing is to make sure the call is accurate, Self said. Collins did say the reviews are something they are always evaluating, weighing the important of accuracy against the quality of game viewing and watchability. Following the tournament, the NCAA will look at all of the data it collects and decide if any changes need to be made and presented to the rules committee. “That’s a constant discussion point for us,” he said.