South Carolina women's basketball: NCAA adds coach's challenges, other rule changes

On Tuesday, the NCAA Playing Rules Oversight Panel approved multiple rule changes for the 2025-26 season, including a coach’s video review challenge.

Under the new rules, coaches are allowed to challenge four types of plays. Officials are no longer allowed to initiate reviews on these plays, except to determine if a foul was on the correct player.

The reviewable plays are: Ruled out-of-bounds violations; Ruled backcourt violations; Whether a change in team possession occurred before the ruling of a foul where free throws would be involved; and Whether a foul was assessed to the correct player.

Similar challenge rules are also in place for men’s basketball, but women’s basketball has one significant difference: in women’s basketball, teams are not required to have a timeout in order to make a challenge. 

However, if a challenge is unsuccessful and the team is out of timeouts, a technical foul for excessive timeouts will be issued.

The goal of the rule change is to cut down on the amount of time spent reviewing plays late in games. The seemingly never-ending video reviews have been a frequent complaint, especially in the men’s NCAA Tournament.

Whether this actually solves that problem remains to be seen.

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For exhibition games next season, there is an experimental rule allowing coaches to call for a video challenge of any foul during the game.

While the challenge review is the most notable change, there are several other changes that range from minor to virtually indetectable to the average fan.

• Setting the shot clock to 20 seconds when, following a dead ball, the offense is awarded the ball in its frontcourt.
• Eliminating the rule that jerseys need to be tucked in. 
• Using excessive timeouts or playing with six players when the ball becomes live will become team technical fouls. These violations will count toward team fouls, and the team will be awarded possession at half-court following the free throws.
• Allowing players to complete a jump stop when their feet land approximately at the same time. This will be a legal move and will not be considered a travel. The NCAA Women’s Basketball Rules Committee thinks this change can increase the accuracy on traveling rulings. 
• Allowing defenders multiple one-hand (hot stove) touches on stationary players holding the ball or on a dribbler. These touches would be legal as long as they are not repetitive and do not affect the rhythm, speed, balance and quickness of the dribbler or reroute the offensive player. 
• If a player competes in a game that the player should have missed due to a suspension, the player and the head coach will both have to serve a one-game suspension for the next scheduled game.

The jersey rule is interesting. Players were never punished for their jerseys coming untucked. Officials would simply instruct them to tuck it back in at the next dead ball. 

But jerseys that are intended to be worn untucked were once common in women’s basketball, particularly in the early 1980s. That design is now coming back into style at the grassroots level. This rule paves the way for new uniform styles or throwbacks (North Carolina has worn untucked throwbacks, but had to get a waiver to do so).

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