Travis Ford says basketball has completely changed

Travis Ford spoke pretty candidly about the new college basketball rule changes on Monday at OSU’s season-opening press conference.

The changes essentially boil down to the fact that there will be fewer (if any) charges called and that defenders won’t be able to touch (literally) offensive players with the ball who are facing the rim.

I’m all in on the rules, mostly because I’m sick of watching un-talented big men sling it off the backboard and guards hold each others wrists for 40 minutes en route to these hideous 51-49 games. When your football team consistently scores more than your hoops team, something needs to be done.

I want my college basketball games to be in the 80s or (gasp) 90s and I think these rule changes play into OSU’s hands anyway with, maybe, the exception of Smart. He’s such a physical player (especially on defense) and if that’s taken away from him I’m curious to see how that affects him — we don’t need any more “pick up three fouls in 11 seconds at West Virginia” incidents.

Anyway, here are some of the better Ford quotes (my comments in non-italics):

“It’s going to change the game more than anything’s changed the game since maybe the three point line.”

I think that might be…um…maybe a bit hyperbolic.

They want more offense! They want more offense!

You can almost see him dotting his sentences with exclamation marks!

“We were told there are no charges!”

Eddie Sutton would have resigned over this.

“He told our guys ‘don’t try and take a charge’ try and be a shot-blocking team.”

Ford’s response: Start Brian Williams at the four.

“We understand defense wins and we have to learn to play great defense within the rules.”

This is kind of always the point, yes?

“Our head of officials looked at our whole team and said ‘you are going to get all the 10 and 15-footers you want.'”

Markel might average 22 a game.

“We had a 30-minute scrimmage and after that 30 minutes was over we had 70 fouls called.”

I do wonder who was calling these fouls. Did they bring in the football team during its bye week? Pay some real officials to come in? If it’s the latter that kind of begs the question “If Big 12 refs can be as bad as they are during real, televised games, how bad are they during not-for-TV scrimmages in an open gym in Stillwater?”

Historically bad, I’m guessing.

h/t Andrew Carter