I don't want to beat a dead horse here, but then again, the world needs sadistic, hippophilic necrophiles too. So: Someday, someone will figure out a way for the ends of college basketball games not to be so preposterously boring.
Actually, that someone is me and the someday was years ago, when I proposed the elimination of free throws and the reduction of the shot clock to 10 seconds in the last two minutes of a game, thus speeding up the action to mind-blowing levels of excitement while still giving trailing teams a chance to mount late comebacks.
That I haven't won a Nobel Prize for this is evidence of nothing more than blatant cronyism in Stockholm.
But just look at that Xavier-Purdue game Saturday, which Xavier won 85-78 to advance to the Sweet 16. When Stanford-Marquette tipped off at 6:46 p.m. EDT, the Xavier-Purdue game had 7:48 left. The Musketeers and Boilermakers didn't finish until 7:31, so it took 45 minutes to play that last 7:48.
While they were doing that, Stanford and Marquette played 17:46 of actual basketball.
It gets worse than that, as you know. It took Purdue and Xavier 33 minutes to play the last 3:25. It took them 24 minutes to play the last 1:42, 14 minutes to play the last 42.8 seconds. All that time consisted almost entirely of dribbling, fouls, walking from one end of the floor to the other, foul shots and timeouts. Plus a few desperation shots hurled up by Purdue.
You know what? Commercials would have been better.
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A well-earned defeat [PERMALINK]
As if this Tournament season wasn't painful enough for me, having to watch Stanford and UCLA pull out close second-round victories in the men's Tournament, I had to watch the alma mater go down to ignominious defeat in the women's Tournament as well.
If ever a team deserved to lose, though, it was California in its second-round game against George Washington, which pulled out a 55-53 win, a 6-over-3 upset in the Greensboro region -- the women are still using those dumb city regional names.
The Colonials had just tied the game with 12.1 seconds left when Cal called timeout. The Bears then inbounded under their own basket and Natasha Vital dribbled to the front court, where she tried to call timeout again. But she traveled before she could get the signal together.
George Washington took over with 5.7 seconds left and Sarah-Jo Lawrence scored the winning basket at the buzzer after rebounding Kimberly Beck's airball.
Good.
If you call timeout with 12.1 seconds left just so you can plan a strategy to get the ball to the front court so you can call timeout again, you deserve to lose. Coach Joanne Boyle led the Bears to their most successful season ever and deserves praise for that. The attempt to micromanage the end game, not so much.
Tellingly, George Washington coach Joe McKeown didn't call timeout before either the game-tying or the game-winning possession.
Sometimes the best coaching is the coaching you don't do. Or a better way to put it: Sometimes the best coaching is the coaching you've already done.
Previous column: The politics of the China Olympics
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About the writer
King Kaufman is a senior writer for Salon. You can e-mail him at king at salon dot com or visit his Facebook page.
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