Eleven seconds.

Think about all the things you could get done in eleven seconds if millions of people were counting on you to do something special in those brief moments.

Now think about all the things you couldn’t do in eleven seconds, despite an uncanny ability to perform under pressure or an OCD induced script prepared to the letter.

Eleven seconds.

That’s the difference between the NBA and NCAA shot clocks, and somehow such a seemingly immaterial disparity has created a chasm between the two levels of basketball that many fans aren’t willing to negotiate.

After the 2001 NBA season, the last in which my hometown Philadelphia 76ers were relevant, I had to take stock of my sports watching portfolio. I found myself angry, nay, disappointed in myself for spending so much time and money on a sport whose urgency and immediacy were praised, on an industry that mirrors our very self-indulgent American culture, on athletes who did everything they could do make their fans unaware of other players on their own teams.

Thank Wooden for the NCAA.

After a particularly one-sided conversation with a fellow former high school hoops coach, I had convinced myself (he had long since checked out of the conversation by that point) that there is no redeeming quality about the NBA worthy of any more of my attention. Far from an erudite “sneakerhead,” I realized that my philosophy would meet with contention, but as far as I could tell, there was no reason to ever watch an NBA game again, especially when a more natural facsimile was just as available every night of the college season.

Determined to prove my point to an otherwise absent contingent of concerned hoops fans, I conducted my own version of the Philadelphia Experiment. I sat myself down, twitching and sweating the entire time, and forced myself to watch an entire quarter of a Sixers-Bucks game.  This twelve minute experiment would provide the empirical data I needed to prove to the world that I was, indeed, correct.

And I counted passes.

At the end of the first quarter, there was never more than three passes in a possession, a number that was consistently offset by the number of one-and-done possessions, the way one kid in your Pre-Calculus class would always ruin the curve with a snide remark and pimply-faced giggle.

To be fair, I didn’t even count leak outs, steals that led to 2 on 1s or 3 on 2s (but that was largely because it was so rare to see a turner-over hustle back to defend his blunder), or blown defensive assignments.

Still, the NBA provided me with a three-pass zenith.

And then I rested.

When I presented this evidence to the same colleague, he looked at me with both pity and sadness and said, “It’s because of the shot clock. There’s no time to run an offense.”

Without so much as an eyebrow arch, I quietly dusted myself off and returned to my classroom. He had me. And I never saw it coming.

Resolute in my own sense of self-worth, I regrouped and conducted the same experiment the very next night during a Syracuse-Pitt game on ESPN’s Big Monday.  Though I knew the average number of passes would be nominally higher because the shot clock was set a full eleven seconds more than in the NBA,  I couldn’t prepare myself for what I was about to see.

These two Big East juggernauts produced an average of six passes a possession (allowing for the same standard deviation as in the NBA model), and that number is even skewed by Syracuse’s penchant for jacking it up vs. Pitt’s insistence to run its halfcourt stuff.

To the untrained eye, that number isn’t staggering, but consider what has to happen for a team to even commit to passing the ball that many times per possession. Egos have to be checked, teams have to take impeccable care of the ball, defenses have to take away what the other team does well to force them into that kind of patience, and, the most important factor, teams know a good shot from a bad one and observe the difference with precision.

Most of us grow up watching the NBA in awe of the sheer athleticism, never even glancing at the neon 24 slowly ticking the life out of what a basketball possession is supposed to be. Thankfully, the braintrust of NCAA basketball had the wisdom to add those eleven seconds to satisfy the purists, to remind kids of the importance of a quality possession, to ensure that, for at least a couple years, our nation’s best basketball players appreciate the nuances of a game meant to be played by five as one instead of by one in spite of five.

And all it took was eleven seconds.