For starters, loosen coaches’ grip on the sport, no bailing out players in trouble with timeouts and start looking out for college basketball instead of the NBA.

College basketball season arrives on Monday. That’s right. The second week of March.

Don’t believe the four months of games you’ve seen or all the reports you’ve read. They are mere exhibitions. Dress rehearsals for the real stuff.

College basketball has become a sleepy sport with little sizzle, until March and the tournaments — conference and NCAA — spring to life and the whole nation pays attention.

College basketball is like golf, a sport with a bunch of events that don’t matter until the majors roll around. In golf, the majors are spread out. In college hoops, the majors are clustered together, on four consecutive weeks.

The drama and the Cinderellas, the buzzer-beaters and the devastating defeats, they capture our attention and we can’t look away “One Shining Moment” blares on the championship post-game show.

It was not always so. 

When star players stuck around for three or four years — in the college game and at one particular school — and the NCAA Tournament was not automatic for a great number of power-conference teams, the regular season was highly entertaining and important.

Those days have gone the way of Sears & Roebuck. They are not likely to return.

But college basketball could help itself. Its regular season could be better, much better, with some changes that would make for a better game and better marketing and a sport that’s not hibernating until March.

Here are 10 ways to make college basketball’s regular season better.

1. Eight-second count

Almost 60 years ago, Sports Illustrated’s Mervin Hyman wrote a story about the full-court press rage in college basketball, particularly UCLA’s.

“The way defenses are operating these days,” then-Southern Methodist coach Doc Hayes told SI, “the other team starts picking you up when you walk out of the hotel lobby on the way to the fieldhouse.”

Be still my heart. Does the younger crowd even know what I mean by full-court press?

The kind of 94-foot pressure defense that Billy Tubbs used at OU and Nolan Richardson used at Arkansas and Jerry Tarkanian used at Nevada-Las Vegas.

Long gone are the days of the UCLA zone trap, which helped John Wooden’s Bruins win 10 NCAA championships in 12 years.

The full-court press created quick scoring opportunities, going both ways. Offenses that broke the press had 2-on-1 and 3-on-2 fastbreaks. Defenses that created turnovers had an easy lane to the basket.

The full-court press brought excitement to the game.

Coaching is more sophisticated than ever before. Full-court presses are easier to break with sharp tactics. It might be that the full-court press no longer wins the risk/reward relationship.

So balance the scales. Adopt the eight-second count. Give teams only eight seconds to get the ball across midcourt. That’s the NBA rule. And yes, NBA teams don’t press full court. But that’s because professionals are much more ball-skilled and better-drilled.

An eight-second count would motivate college coaches to pull out the Sports Illustrated vault and remember how to full-court press.

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— Sellout Crowd (@selloutcrowd_) February 28, 2024

2. Coaches sit down

You old-timers, let’s play a mind game. Go back in your memory and recall the images of Wooden, coaching UCLA. The Wizard of Westwood won those 10 NCAA titles from 1964-75.

The glasses. The gray hair. The rolled-up game plan.

And one more thing. Wooden always was sitting down. 

Fast forward to 2024, and most coaches never sit down. Heck, we’re lucky when they just stay out of bounds.

Over-coaching is a pandemic in the sport. Coaches refuse to relinquish control. Every possession, barking orders, keeping their players on edge.

The coaching grip on the sport — always barking at referees, always in their players’ ears — has the sport in a slog. The free-flowing potential of basketball is thwarted. Like speed bumps on a thoroughfare, college basketball stops and starts and stops again.

The best coaches have their teams prepared via practice, not that we’d know what that looks like in 2024.

So let’s put a physical muzzle on the coaches. Don’t let them stand up when the ball’s in play. Make them sit down. Let down the reins. Don’t try to control the entire game.

3. No timeouts to get out of trouble

When a wide receiver beats a cornerback on a deep ball, the cornerback is not allowed to pull up and signal timeout.

When a baserunner is caught in a rundown between second and third base, he’s not allowed to stop and ask for time.

So when a basketball player is trapped in the corner, with a five- or 10-second count looming, why is he allowed to call timeout and get a do-over?

It makes no sense. Potential turnovers and tense situations are some of the best moments of a basketball game. So why are we handing out get-out-of-jail-free cards?

New rule: no timeouts when the referee is counting. Inbounds passes. Advancing the ball past halfcourt. Traps. Let the plays play out.

4. Six fouls for disqualification

Let’s get this straight. College basketball has a shortage of stars. College basketball disqualifies players when they reach five fouls, including the few standout players you can find.

This isn’t complicated. Raise the foul limit to six. Quit sending the best players to the bench because of early foul trouble. Quit sending the best players to the showers because of fouling out.

5. Pay players, not coaches

Here’s a revolutionary idea. With name, image, likeness, schools virtually are allowed to pay players. So do it. The schools like OSU and OU that don’t have big NIL budgets for basketball, take the money out of the coaches’ salaries and pay players more.

Roster turnover — both due to transfer and to the professional ranks — is at the heart of college basketball’s marketing problem. Fans don’t know their own players, from year to year.

Bigger NIL budgets could help that, and if it costs you a coach, it costs you a coach. There aren’t a lot of Eddie Suttons or Kelvin Sampsons patrolling the sidelines these days. 

Don’t let coaches hold you hostage. If they want to leave, let them leave. If they threaten to leave, say thanks for your service. For too long, coaches have been the faces of college basketball. Let’s change that.

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— Sellout Crowd (@selloutcrowd_) February 27, 2024

6. Relax NBA Draft guidelines

Allow players to return to college, even if they’ve applied for the NBA Draft and were drafted.

Since 2019, players with eligibility remaining who apply for the draft but aren’t drafted, then are eligible to return to college.

But players that are drafted are not eligible to return to college, by NCAA rules. That’s to protect the NBA franchises from wasting a pick.

My question is, why is college basketball in the business of looking out for the NBA? It ought to be the other way around. College basketball is the enterprise in trouble. College basketball helps the NBA more than the NBA helps college basketball.

So get rid of the rule. Allow any drafted player who doesn’t sign a contract — maybe he doesn’t like the franchise that drafted him, or maybe it’s the slot — to return to college hoops.

This rarely would happen. Most college players are itching to get to the NBA, in any form. And coaches would hate the rule, because it could lead to roster uncertainty.

But like I’ve been saying since the transfer portal went into overdrive. Coaches finally are earning their exorbitant salaries.

Any marquee player who wants to stay in college, even if it takes him awhile to figure it out, should be encouraged to do so.

Yes, NBA teams might grow leery of drafting marginal players who might consider returning to college. And what exactly is wrong with that? Baseball has no sympathy.

7. Play on campus!

In the last two seasons, OU has played Southern Cal and Iowa in San Diego, Arkansas in Tulsa, North Carolina in Charlotte and Ole Miss, Seton Hall and Nebraska in Kissimmee, Florida.

Over the same time, OSU has played St. Bonaventure, Notre Dame and Virginia Tech in Brooklyn, and Central Florida and DePaul in the Bahamas.

Can we please move some — nay, all — of those games to one campus or the other. College basketball has an insatiable desire to keep interesting non-conference games from the local fans.

Blame coaches, who don’t want to agree to home-and-home series, again, for controlling purposes. They don’t want difficult home games before conference.

But far too many home games are against Eastern This and Southern That. A few good non-conference opponents might jazz the home crowd.

8. Go to quarters

The last basketball on Earth that doesn’t divide into quarters is the men’s college game.

We have a perfect laboratory test. The women’s game moved to quarters a few years ago, and we have seen how it checks all kinds of boxes:

* One fewer clock stoppage per half.

* A reset of the foul limit, which cuts down on foul shots, the bane of every basketball game.

* Twice as many buzzer-beating opportunities, which are some of basketball’s most exciting plays.

The only reason for men’s basketball to not adopt the quarter system is because men’s basketball would have thought of it last.

Not much of a reason.

9. Change the calendar

College basketball season tips off in early November. Most of America doesn’t even know it. 

Football runs this sports-crazy nation, yet college basketball chooses to keep starting its season earlier and earlier, going head-to-head with the gridiron.

The explanation is easy. The NCAA is married to CBS and its massive NCAA Tournament contract, and CBS also is married to the Masters. So the basketball must end in early April.

And it suffocates the sport in a variety of ways.

If you can’t ditch CBS, start the NCAA Tournament a month later, the week after the Masters. March Madness is a cool term, but not cool enough to keep at the expense of college basketball’s health.

Tip off the season in mid-December. Make it a one-semester sport. Two-semester sports, of which there are few, create all kinds of eligibility issues.

Basketball waited too long to make this change truly effective. The expanded College Football Playoff kicks off in mid-December and will soak up much of the bandwidth.

But still. Mid-December is much better than early November. Starting college basketball in early November means protracted weeks of hoops going head-to-head with football. Basketball always will lose that battle big.

The less exposure to football, the better for basketball.

Start in mid-December, tip off with some massive matchups in mid-week and light a fire in the sport. All but 12 schools will be mostly ready for something else. Take advantage of it.

10. 24-second clock

Reducing the shot clock from 30 seconds to 24 would not necessarily create a quicker pace and better tempo. It might make for worse basketball — skill level is an issue; making lesser-skilled players speed up might create more sloppy play.

But the 24-second clock could cut down on the late-game fouling situations that stretch games 15 minutes longer than they need to be stretched.

It’s only six-seconds difference, but that could cause the interminable fouling to begin later in the game. A team down eight points with two minutes left can wait a little longer to start fouling.

And heck, who knows? Maybe the 24-second clock will have a positive impact on the pace of the game.