Nate Oats has turned Alabama into an SEC powerhouse on the basketball court, and while he has yet to break through and win a national title, Oats is already one of the preeminent coaches in the sport. Now, as he tries to break through for another Final Four appearance and a championship banner, Oats will have even more on his shoulders and more discretion to determine the outcome of the game.
On Tuesday, the NCAA Playing Rules Oversight Panel approved rule changes to “help enhance the flow of the game in men’s basketball for the 2025-26 season,” according to an NCAA press release. The most notable rule change is a coach’s challenge, which can be used at any point throughout the game so long as the challenging team still has a timeout remaining.
Coaches will be able to challenge out-of-bounds calls, basket interference,/goaltending, and whether a secondary defender was in the restricted area arc. If the challenge is successful, teams will have one additional video review challenge for the rest of the game, including overtime. If the challenge is unsuccessful, the team loses the challenge and cannot challenge for the rest of the game.
Our end of game agony could be over
Perhaps the most exciting part of the rule changes for fans of men’s college basketball is that officials will no longer be able to review an out-of-bounds call at any point in the game unless through a coach’s challenge.
Those reviews caused constant delays to the finish of games and made the final two minutes of any men’s college basketball game almost unbearable to watch. Giving the power to the coaches will leave us with some late-game reviews, and officials can still go to the monitor for goaltending calls, but this should significantly cut the number of times the officials go to the monitor and kill the momentum of the game.
There will undoubtedly be a significant call missed and a coach who finds himself without a challenge, but now that is simply part of coaching and the ever-evolving decision-making process on the sidelines. That could cause some frustration from an aggrieved fan base, but that’s better than causing the entire college basketball watching population grief with constant stoppages during every close game.
As far as Alabama is concerned, the analytically driven coaching staff under Oats will no doubt find a way to optimize their challenge usage and extract the slightest edge on the rest of the country, as good coaching staffs always do. The introduction of the coach’s challenge is good news for the Crimson Tide and college basketball at large.