It’s a bit silly to make sweeping judgments on a team based on the first game of the season. But one sensible thing we can do very early in the season is get a feel for how the game as a whole might be changing. With 140 D-I vs D-I games in the books, that’s like 4 team-seasons of data which is a legitimate sample to draw conclusions from.
Last season, the most important change to the game was the removal of the flopping warning prior to a flopping technical. All flops were penalized with a Class B technical foul, a penalty of exactly one free throw.1
Even though it wasn’t received well, it seemed to have an impact. Actual charges were down and shots at the rim were up. And it seemed like there were fewer flops. Perhaps the best evidence it worked is that NBA decided to adopt the rule, which was a real honor considering the NBA never copies something from the NCAA.2
While I think the flopping technicals provided a deterrent to flopping, the evidence wasn’t overwhelming. This season, the NCAA continued its war on charging by changing the definition of a charge altogether. Now a secondary defender must be in legal guarding position before the offensive player plants his take-off foot. Per the Men’s Basketball Rule Book:
Legal guarding position – (Rule 4-17.4.d) Established legal guarding position on an airborne player with the ball, the defender must establish legal guarding position before the opponent places the last foot on the floor prior to becoming airborne.
Well, after three days of basketball, scoring is up and it’s clear that the driving force is fewer charges being called. For our first exhibit, let’s look at how various stats compared to similar stages of previous seasons. We have a handy page for this on my site. But here’s how things look after three days:
You’ll notice that efficiency, or offensive rating, or whatever you want to call points scored per 100 possessions is at 101.6 through three days of action. That’s a bump from recent years where we could assume that offensive rating would be sub-100 in the early days of the season.3
You’ll also notice that shooting and free throws are more or less in line with previous seasons. The other half of the four factors - offensive rebounding and turnovers - are the difference makers. In fact, I don’t quite understand why offensive rebounds are up. Shots at the trim are up slightly from last year, but not enough to explain the difference. After a decades-long trend of coaches preferring to retreat their players after a shot, perhaps they have seen the light that there’s not much risk in letting guys already near the paint make an effort to grab missed shot.
There’s an obvious connection of charges to turnovers. The connection is stronger when you separate turnovers into steals and non-steals. Approximately 10% of possessions have ended in steals so far. That’s actually up from this time last season and the highest value through three days since 2013. On a related note, the block rate of 10.2% is the highest in modern history at this point in the season.4
But non-steal turnovers are down - way down. Charges fall into this category, along with other offensive fouls, violations like traveling, and general ball-handling incompetence where a steal can’t be awarded. But it’s mostly offensive fouls.
Let’s graph it!
While steals are increasing in recent years, non-steal turnovers (NST’s) are plummeting. Just 8.5% of possessions have ended in an NST so far, down from 9.6% at this time last season. That’s a huge drop in relative terms - about 1 in 8 non-steal turnovers have vanished. It’s the lowest mark in recorded college basketball history, and I can confidently say it’s the lowest mark in college basketball history, period.
We can get more granular, though. And when we do we find out that the decrease in non-steal turnovers probably understates the decrease in charges. Modern play-by-play listings record offensive fouls, and the offensive foul is indeed eligible for the endangered species list. Here are offensive fouls5 per game over the past four seasons (for which we have more extensive play-by-play data):
Season Off fouls/game Flop T's/game
2024 2.77 0.03
2023 4.06 0.36
2022 4.33 0.05
2021 4.50 0.02Offensive fouls are down 32% from last year and 38% from the 2021 season. That’s it. That’s the story of the start to this season.
I’ve seen some skepticism about whether officials will continue to call it this way the rest of the season. Last season, the notorious flopping rule was called somewhat aggressively early in the season only to be gradually phased out by March.
But the charge rule is a little different. For one thing it’s more of an actual rule than a gimmick. On some level, one could understand officials not wanting to award a team a free point in the NCAA tournament because an opponent may have flopped. But there should be no such fear here. This is the rule. There’s not an obvious excuse to fall back to the way things used to be. But time will tell and we will keep tracking it.
On a related note, the crackdown on charges has apparently been so successful that the flopping technical has been phased out. As far as I know, the rule hasn’t changed from last year, when through three days we averaged one flopping technical every three games. This year there have been a total of four flopping technicals in D-I vs D-I action.
So that experiment is clearly over. Let’s hope the charging experiment doesn’t suffer a similar fate. Yes, scoring is up, but shooting hasn’t really improved much and steals and blocks are as high as they’ve ever been. It turns out that even without the charge as a defensive tactic, teams can still play defense if they actually try.
Well, obviously not all flops or even most of them. And some non-flops got penalized, too.
The best example of this is that the NCAA does not count desperation heaves at the end of a period/game as field goal attempt. Inexplicably, the NBA does, which ends up being a total buzz kill as it naturally results in very few players attempting half-court shots at the end of a period.
Offensive rating always increases as the season continues. The full season average will be about 3 points higher than it is now.
It’s probably not a coincidence that blocks are up as charges are down.
This includes all offensive fouls, so illegal screens and other non-charges are counted here. It’s the best we can do.