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The approved changes were preceded by recommendations made from both the NCAA Men’s and Women’s Basketball Committees in May.

Among the most notable of the approved changes — and seeming to take clear inspiration from both the NBA and WNBA version of the rule — the men and women’s games are implementing their own take on a coach’s challenge that will initiate video review.

Optimism remains that this can make the sport a more entertaining product as a whole and minimize the presence of time-consuming disruptions from ref-inititated replay reviews.

“I think (these changes) will add to another layer of excitement — maybe drama,” said Marley Washenitz, senior transfer guard on the Arizona State women’s basketball team. “(The game) is always going to be evolving and changing and hopefully for the better.”

Different from previous seasons, the ability for officials to initiate reviews will be significantly hampered. On the men’s side, officials will no longer be able to review out-of-bounds calls unless directed through a coach’s challenge. Other uses of replay like shot clock violations, timing mistakes and more can still be initiated by official review, however.

On the women’s side, officials can’t initiate reviews on the approved types of plays that can be challenged by a coach at any point in a game, unless they need to determine if a foul call was given to the correct player.

The rules that can be challenged by a coach at any point of the game include the following, according to an NCAA release:

Women's rules

– 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

– Whether a foul was assessed to the correct player

Men's rules

– Ruled out-of-bounds calls

– Basket interference

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– Whether a secondary defender was in the restricted-area arc

But, there is a slight twist.

For the men, a coach’s challenge can only be relied upon if the requesting team has a timeout. A successful challenge will also yield an additional video review challenge at the team’s disposal for the rest of the game and overtime. An unsuccessful challenge means the team can’t use a challenge for the rest of the game.

For the women, a timeout is not required for replay review. A technical foul will be assessed to the requesting bench if a challenge fails, however.

For years, both the Men’s and Women’s Basketball Rules Committees have met in the offseason to recommend rule tweaks with the intent to improve the state of their respective games.

But the latest changes might represent the most impactful modification to the rules since the 2013-14 season, where an expansive use of replay review was approved — notoriously giving officials the ability to use replay review in the last two minutes of games in regulation or overtime to confirm a shot-clock violation or discover which player was the last to touch a ball before it went out of bounds.

The intent to improve upon this rule might be clear, but not everyone is convinced just yet.

“I don’t know if it improves the flow, because there’s stoppage and no one likes stoppage,” ASU women’s associate basketball coach Stephanie Norman said. “But, I think at the end of the day people want to get (calls) right.”

Some fans might disagree with her, after the sport has long been at the mercy of a replay system that has been shown to substantially slow down even the most exciting of college basketball games.

At the conclusion of the 2025 NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament round of 32, the Wall Street Journal calculated that there had been 52 reviews conducted by officials, lasting for 111 minutes and 23 seconds — about three full games worth of reviews.

Heading into the upcoming season, it seems those in charge are proponents of evolving the rules for the better. And eventually, possibly making them standard across the board.

“We should have a unified way that we have instant replay,” ASU athletics director Graham Rossini said. “We should be playing from the same rules.”