Experimentation became part of the exempt-event package last January when the former NCAA Council stipulated that in order for an event to obtain exempt status, it had to agree to use experimental rules.

The rules committees asked that experimentation be conducted this year in exempt events that occurred before December 1, including the men's and women's preseason National Invitation Tournaments, the Maui Invitational and the Great Alaska Shootout. This year's events featured more than 100 men's and women's games in which experimentation occurred.

The system is designed to solve an age-old issue of experimenting in legitimate regular-season events without compromising the game.

Reluctance to alter rules

"History shows that conferences, coaches and institutions didn't want to experiment during the regular season because of the desire to be consistent with the rules used during the NCAA tournament," said James A. Haney, executive director of the National Association of Basketball Coaches (NABC). "But if you look at what's in the best interests of the game, I think -- in terms of trying to experiment with potential rules changes -- the exempted contests are the best opportunity we have."

Haney served as the tournament director for the NABC Classic, which along with the NABC's Coaches vs. Cancer IKON Classic tipped off this year's men's basketball season.

There was some concern that requiring exempt events to use experimental rules may compromise the integrity of the event, but Larry Keating, who chaired the NCAA Men's Basketball Rules Committee when this year's experimental rules were developed, said the committees wanted to protect that integrity.

"Experimental rules shouldn't compromise the integrity of an event if they're managed carefully," he said. "If you're trying something really dramatic, you might have to worry about whether or not that's the correct way to go, but if it's something that tinkers with the game a little bit that you can put up with for the preseason, then that's probably OK."

"The only time you'd compromise the integrity of the event," Haney said, "would be if you experiment with something frivolous. But I don't see the rules committees ever doing that. What we experimented with this year were very important steps to looking at the pace of the game, particularly in the closing minutes, and the excessive contact during free throws."

Data will be compiled and paired against a control group of games played without the experimental rules. Coaches and officials who participated in the exempted contests also will be surveyed on the effectiveness of the experimental rules. That data and feedback will be available for discussion at the rules committees' annual meeting in June.

Early reaction seems to favor the reduction in players in the lane during free throws as a way to reduce congestion and contact, but reaction to the four-quarter format has been mixed at best.

The format had been under discussion for several years and finally was tried this year as a way to address the flow of the game, particularly in the closing minutes. A new timeout structure was imposed that assigned teams the television stoppages in each quarter, and what used to be each team's two additional full timeouts were redistributed as breaks between quarters and four 30-second timeouts apiece.

The theory was that by assigning the full television timeouts and providing no additional full timeouts, neither team would have a full timeout in the closing minutes, but would instead have to rely on its supply of 30-second timeouts to stop the clock in tight situations. This prevented the full timeouts -- often taken back-to-back now in close games -- from being stockpiled and interrupting the flow of the game at what should be its most exciting point.

While the timeout structure may have effectively addressed the flow of the game, the four-quarter format in which it was packaged represented a dramatic change -- too dramatic for some.

"There was a feeling out there that somehow the four-quarter format was going to help solve the (end of game) problems," Keating said. "What it's done perhaps is put aside four quarters once and for all. But it (the timeout structure) does clean up the end of the game. That part of the experiment was positive."

Timeouts have been under scrutiny ever since television began having a major impact on the game. Current rules allow coaches two additional full timeouts above and beyond the eight television stoppages in a game. But they used to get three, and now the four-quarter format gives them none.

Impact on coaches' management

To be sure, the primary question to be asked of coaches is whether the timeout structure in the four-quarter format allowed them to manage their game.

Mike Montgomery, who coached Stanford University to the Big Island Invitational title, thought that turning the current 20-second timeouts into 30-second timeouts was a good compromise for taking away the two fulls.

"The 30s allowed you to make the adjustments you needed to make," he said. "It's plenty of time to communicate. You have to know what you're going to do and you have to have the kids hustle over, but it eliminates milling around for most of a two-minute timeout trying to make it look like you're coming up with a brainstorm."

"The 30s were fine," said Jim Calhoun, whose University of Connecticut Huskies advanced to the semifinals of the men's preseason NIT. "We prepared ourselves in practice and put the onus on the fact that you had better be able to execute. If you're designing a last-second play and need two minutes to do it, you probably haven't practiced very well."

Many believe that the timeout structure, particularly near the end of games, creates a philosophical tug of war. On the one hand, there's a desire to expedite the end of the game by reducing timeouts, but coaches resist relinquishing control over game situations.

"If we really want to play the game according to the idealistic formula, we'd go back to the rules as they were originally written," Haney said. "We'd have five timeouts, the coach would call them and they'd be one minute in length. But we departed from that a long time ago.

"Whether we like it or not, college basketball is a business and business is about attracting a following at the gate as well as from television. As it is now, though, with repeated timeouts, a television viewer can end up losing interest and may not come back for the end of the game. So to try to philosophically get into whether television drives the changes -- well, that decision was made and we're a long way down the road."

Keating said television, particularly in the early 1980s, dramatically impacted the way the game was coached. Coaches of teams that received a lot of television exposure learned to manage the game in four-minute intervals and did so rather successfully.

"What happened when television entered the picture was that with the eight additional breaks in the game, teams with a lot of television experience were at an advantage because those teams played harder for four minutes than they might have if they were playing for 20 minutes straight. It was a gradual acclimation that players and coaches had to make. The other teams didn't seem to have that same intensity for the four minutes.

"So now you've got these breaks and we never really backed off the other full timeouts until recently."

How much is too much?

How much should coaches have to give up in order to address how the game looks on television?

"It's an important issue that needs to be dealt with," Haney said. "As coaches, we have a responsibility to win basketball games, but we also have a responsibility to do what's best for the game. Sometimes those things result in difficult decisions, but ultimately what's best for the game has to take precedent."

With the advent of mandatory experimentation in exempt events, maybe there will be more of an opportunity to see what really is best for the game.

Keating said there is continuing interest in studying a revised timeout structure, but maybe in halves next time instead of quarters.

"What we wanted to do was to manage timeouts the way the NBA does, but we may not have needed the quarters to do it," he said. "So if we simply stop the quarters and keep the assignment of timeouts and leave coaches with their 30s, then maybe this will work. But the flow of the game is clearly improved by reducing the number of timeouts."

And this year there will be data to prove it.