The college basketball season begun in full force Friday night, with an awesome slate of game, highlighted by No. 11 Indiana beating No. 3 Kansas 103-99 in overtime in the Armed Forces Classic.
As it turned out, Hoosiers-Jayshawks featured all the things right about college basketball (lots of points, all-out effort, thrilling overtime finish) and also featured some of the things wrong with college basketball, namely lots of timeouts and so, so, sooo many fouls.
Somehow, a 45-minute game (regulation, plus five minutes of overtime) featured 63 fouls, which comes out to a foul every 43 seconds. Kansas committed 32, Indiana committed 31. Seven players fouled out, including 80 percent of the Jayhawks’ starting lineup. Eleven of the 13 players to play at least 18 minutes picked up four or more fouls. Indiana’s De’Ron Davis picked up three fouls in seven minutes.
There’s a lot to love about college basketball, but these types of games are a little too common. College players tend to be less skilled than pros, which results in more banging and reaching and bumping. Referees can be in a tough spot because the only way to prevent players from playing too physically is to call fouls, but whistling every infraction slows games to a snail’s pace.
Whether we should blame the players, the coaches, the refs or the rules that incentivize late-game fouling, we can agree that no one wants to see 74 free-throw attempts and 54 field-goal attempts. At that point it’s barely basketball.
