Why no quarters in college basketball?

Factual Questions
1

Every other level that I know of has 4 quarters, college just has 2 halves. Is there any reason for this?

2

It was just the way the game evolved. Basketball at all levels started out with halves.

I believe high school basketball switched to quarters at a very early stage because they wanted more time for the players to rest, but that’s a guess. I assume that pro basketball adopted quarters for a similar reason and also because they had longer periods.

International basketball has halves.

3

And now I see that international ball is actually 4 10-minute quarters.

4

I assume that this is true as well. ISTM that college hoops should adopt the same strategy. Especially since it allows for 2 extra TV timeouts and adds the potential for 2 more buzzer beater shots which arguably are the most exciting part of the game.

5

Bump. Anybody have a definitive answer?

6

The machine only accepts dollar bills?

7

James Naismith’s original rules of basketball provided for halves instead of quarters. Colleges began playing under that rule in the 1890’s and never changed. So the question is asking why something didn’t happen (the switch to quarters which took place at every other level), rather than why something did, which is always more difficult to answer. College basketball never changed because nobody ever saw a good reason to change.

8

According to the NCAA record book, college basketball used four 10-minute quarters for three seasons: 1951-52, 52-53, 53-54.

Then the NCAA switched back and likely never will switch to quarters because there really is no point. Fans are used to 2 20-minute halves and there are enough TV timeouts built in to the game anyway.

I found newspaper articles about the switch at the time but it didn’t seem to be a big issue to switch to quarters nor to switch back to halves. The 1951 article indicated that the pros and high school were already using quarters at the time.

I can only guess that major college coaches didn’t like quarters. Also, basketball has a long tradition of tweaking its rules as the times and players change.