Back in the early days of broadcasting college basketball, there were
TV timeouts occurs after the first deadball situation after 16 minutes left in the period, 12 minutes left in the period, 8 minutes left in the period, and 4 minutes left in the period. Should a team call a time out during a period and the broadcaster go to commercial, one of the TV timeouts is deleted from the schedule. That makes a total of eight TV timeouts in regulation per game. Add that to the twelve timeouts that the coaches are able to call (four 75 second timeouts and two 30 second timeouts), and you potentially have 20 timeouts during a regulation game. This does not include timeouts called by officials to review a call or foul, or clock issue.

Where it gets bad is when the coaches don't call many timeouts until the 3-4 minutes of the game.

For example in a close game, there can easily be half a dozen timeouts called in the last 2 minutes. Add these to the previous four TV timeouts already used, and you have a heck of a lot of timeouts just in the 2nd half.

Any coach worth his salt will recognize when a TV timeout is due and save his own timeout for a more judicious moment, unless he needs to call one to stop a major momentum change.

So yes there are many more timeouts now than there used to be. Coaches get six, rather than five per regulation game, the number of media timeouts has increased, and video replay has dramatically increased the number of official's timeouts.

And yes, I watched NCAA basketball in the 1980's too.