NCAA ATLANTA, GA – APRIL 05: A detail of giant NCAA logo is seen outside of the stadium on the practice day prior to the NCAA Men’s Final Four at the Georgia Dome on April 5, 2013 in Atlanta, Georgia. (Photo by Streeter Lecka/Getty Images)

If the NCAA men’s basketball rules committee gets what it wants, there will be a handful of rule changes in college basketball next season. Scoring and shooting percentages continued to increase last season, presumably as a result of rule changes over the last few years that hoped for such effects, so this year the committee didn’t propose anything too drastic. Leading the list of recommended changes is extending the coach’s box to 38 feet.

Currently, the coach’s box goes 28 feet, which is about three-fifths of the way toward halfcourt. Extending the mark to 38 feet would allow coaches to get within a few feet of halfcourt. Duquesne coach Keith Dambrot, who chairs the committee, said this would improve communication between coaches and players.

“We believe this change will help our coaches, particularly when the ball is at the opposite end of the floor,” Dambrot said.

Unfortunately, this change would come 25 years too late for John Calipari, who got called for a BS technical foul in the 1992 Sweet Sixteen for being outside the box.

The other big change on the board is resetting the shot clock to 20 seconds after a foul or violation such as a kicked ball in the frontcourt. If there are more than 20 seconds left on the shot clock at the time of the foul, then the clock stays where it is.

Currently, any foul resets the shot clock to a full 30 seconds. The NIT experimented with this rule change, and it helped speed along possessions.

This proposal reflects a rule the NBA has held since 1998, where their 24 second shot clock resets to 14 seconds if a foul or other violation occurs with 13 seconds or fewer left to shoot.

Here are a few other notable changes the rules committee has proposed:

**Allowing officials to review if a defender was outside the restricted-area arc on block/charge calls in the final two minutes of regulation or overtime. The Big Ten and MAC already experimented with this rule last season.

**Taking a minimum of 0.3 seconds off the clock whenever the ball is legally touched. There’s no question this one should be passed.

**Require a screener’s feet be no wider than his shoulders, or else it’s an illegal screen.

One notably absent proposal was moving from two halves to four quarters. The women’s game has already done this, and the men’s game experimented with it in postseason play. There’s no real downside to switching to four quarters, and it would help make the game of basketball uniform across all levels.

But we’ll have to wait at least another year on that one.

[NCAA]

About Jesse Kramer

Jesse is a writer and editor for The Comeback. He has also worked for SI.com and runs The Catch and Shoot, a college basketball website based in Chicago. He is a graduate of the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University. Follow Jesse on Twitter @Jesse_Kramer.