Tournament means extra long timeouts

Associated Press

Cincinnati power forward Yancy Gates didn’t even notice that he had a lot more time to catch his breath during his first NCAA tournament appearance last season.

Halftime? Longer than normal. Timeouts? Those too.

“They’re longer?” Gates said. “I didn’t even know.”

Sure are. And for smaller schools that don’t get to play on network television very often, they’re a lot longer than the norm, forcing coaches and players to adjust during the biggest games they’ll play all season.

“It’s definitely different,” Ohio State coach Thad Matta said.

During the regular season, the length of halftimes and timeouts differs by conference and network. In the NCAA tournament, they’re both longer. Halftime lasts 20 minutes — 5 minutes longer than most regular-season breaks.

That part’s not such a big adjustment. Often, teams have to go farther to get to their locker rooms at the tournament sites, with so many teams sharing an arena.

“In the NCAA tournament, you have like 10 minutes to walk to your locker room,” Kentucky coach John Calipari said. “Some of it is that. You need more time.”

The timeouts are a different matter entirely.

During tournament games this season, the media timeouts after each 4 minutes of play will last 2 minutes, 30 seconds, the NCAA’s David Worlock said. Add in the time it takes for players to get back in place on court, and it’s roughly a 3-minute break.

In addition, each team gets five timeouts — same as the regular season. Four of them are full timeouts that last 60 seconds. One of them is a 30-second timeout that must be used during the first half. The first team-called timeout of each half expands to 2 minutes, 30 seconds.

Confusing? Consider the teams from smaller conferences that get only a fraction of time to talk things over during their regular-season games.

“I don’t mind the [longer halftime] as much,” Belmont coach Rick Byrd said. “In some of these arenas, you’ve got to go a long way. So I don’t mind that as much as the length of the timeouts.”

During the regular season, Byrd’s team has only 75 seconds during a full timeout for non-TV games — half the length of one in the NCAA tournament — and 1 minute, 45 seconds during televised league games.

When Belmont reached the final of the Atlantic Sun tournament, which had longer TV timeouts as part of an ESPN network show, he found himself with too much time to talk.

“With the normal media timeouts in our conference, sometimes you don’t feel you have enough time to get across what you need to say,” Byrd said. “I’d finish talking, send them out and they were standing around for 15 or 20 seconds. So it’s not our normal procedure.”

Even those who are accustomed to having plenty of time to talk can run out of things to say during the tournament. They huddle their teams around them in those folding chairs, make their points ... and wait.

“There’s sometimes you talk and get done and realize you’ve got another minute left and nothing to say,” Michigan State’s Tom Izzo said.