Millions of college football fans will watch tonight's LSU-Ohio State game and wonder why big-time college football can't legitimately settle its national championship on the field. On a far smaller scale across Maryland, thousands of high school boys basketball fans watch their favorite game and wonder why there is no shot clock.

It's amazing to think that more than 20 years after college basketball adopted a shot clock and more than 50 years since a 24-second clock came to the NBA that the notion hasn't filtered down to boys public school basketball in Maryland.

The absence of a clock often reduces the fourth quarter of a close game to a dribble fest, as the team in the lead holds the ball to preserve a lead, ostensibly playing the game differently in the last four or five minutes than it did the first 28 or so.

But there are those, Prince George's County athletics coordinator Earl Hawkins most prominent among them, who believe that instituting a shot clock would bring down Western civilization, or at least good basketball, by taking a premium off good defense.

Hawkins, a former coach who chairs the Maryland Public Secondary Schools Athletic Association's boys basketball committee and has the loudest voice on this issue, is diametrically opposed to a shot clock in the boys game, despite the fact that girls in Maryland have been playing with a shot clock for years.

Indeed, the presence of a shot clock in the girls game negates one of the chief pieces of opposition to a clock, namely the cost. If they're already in gyms and working for the girls, they can be used in boys games as well without any additional outlay.

People got over the installation of a three-point line in high school hoops and they can get over a shot clock, too. Boys high school basketball is a good game that can be made much better with a 35-to-45-second shot clock.