It's time to reimagine the start of the college basketball season
Men's college basketball isn't in grave danger, but the tip-off to its season is often forgettable. So why not try to change it?
On Monday afternoon, the 2023-24 men’s college basketball season officially started when IUPUI tipped off against Spalding, a Division III school in Louisville of about 2,300 students, in front of an announced 4,867 fans at Indiana Farmers Coliseum in Indianapolis.
If you weren’t aware of the season’s start or were caught off guard by its arrival, it’s understandable.
The college basketball season often begins with little fanfare. It’s a five-month season the majority of the country doesn’t focus its attention on until the final few weeks of that stretch. It comes at a remarkably busy time on the sports calendar, with the NFL being the overbearing behemoth it is, college football entering the stretch run, and the NBA and NHL seasons in their early stages.
This year, that lack of a grand introduction was particularly noticeable. On Monday, 20 of the 25 teams in the AP preseason poll played a Division I opponent. The average spread for those games? A whopping 26 points, with only one of the contests, USC’s 82-69 win over Kansas State, carrying a spread lower than 15 points.
At least this season, it was a problem unique to the men’s game. The South Carolina and Notre Dame women, both top-10 teams, played a game in Paris. Defending national champion LSU opened in Las Vegas against Colorado, a fellow preseason top-20 team. On Thursday night, Iowa and Virginia Tech played in front of 15,196 fans in Charlotte and a national TV audience.
Those lopsided results and unambitious matchups in men’s college basketball prompted a larger discussion among those who closely follow the sport. More often than not, it was met with derision, with a number of prominent voices bemoaning what it meant for the sport.
Truth be told, I had been planning this newsletter months earlier because I, too, regularly find myself underwhelmed with the opening week of the season. I grew up around the sport and covered it professionally as a beat writer for the past decade, so I always knew when the first game was and happily welcomed its return, but in conversations with other sports fans I knew, many of whom liked college basketball, they didn’t seem to care because, frankly, they didn’t have much of a reason to.
There’s a better way forward, though. A sport that ends its season with a tournament should begin its season with one. It can’t be as big and elaborate of a production as the NCAA Tournament because, really, how could it be, but there needs to be an infrastructure conducive to drama, pressure and high stakes, even with more than 30 games remaining for all of these teams.
Let’s kick off the college basketball season with an eight-team, single-elimination tournament.
Why the start of the season could stand to be tweaked
College basketball’s muted unveiling is partially by design.
Of the sport’s six major conferences, four have a 20-game conference schedule while the other two employ an 18-game slate. In both instances, nearly two-thirds of a team’s regular season is taken up by opponents from its own league. In some instances – like the Big 12 the past decade – that conference is so deep and challenging that you’ll only want to test yourself so much in non-conference play.
With that comes a lot of filler. Even teams that are adventurous with their out-of-league schedules will play, maybe, four or five other major-conference teams, but that’s it. It creates a symbiotic relationship. Teams from the sport’s power conferences need to stack wins and inflate their NCAA Tournament resumes while working out the imperfections by competing against clearly inferior competition. For smaller schools, it’s both a recruiting pitch – ‘Hey, you get to play against [insert brand-name school here] if you come play for us’ – and, more importantly, a trip worth tens of thousands of dollars that helps fund the entire athletic department.
Regardless of how sensible the rationale is, schedules get naturally diluted and whole chunks of the season have little appeal to the casual fan. To paraphrase a line from the late FX show “The League,” the non-conference portion of the college basketball season is like the honeydew in a fruit salad – nobody likes it, but you need it there to take up space.
But what if you could add a few sweeter, juicer and tastier pieces of fruit to that mixture?
Here’s the fix
At least part of the beauty of the NCAA Tournament is rooted in its simplicity. It’s why everybody, even Carol at the cubicle next to you, knows how to fill out a bracket come mid-March every year.
You can’t recreate March Madness in November. A 68-team field is too unwieldy and trying to spawn an imitation would strip the thing being copied of its inherent appeal and charm. It’d be like the scene in “Jurassic Park” when Jeff Goldblum’s character talks about the businessmen and scientists who were so obsessed with asking whether they could give birth to dinosaurs that they failed to stop and ask themselves if they should.
But what about a small sliver of the NCAA Tournament, an appetizer almost half a year before that beautiful first Thursday of the event to try to tap into that excitement?
That’s what I’m suggesting with an eight-team tournament, which could be owned and operated by either the NCAA itself or one of a slew of sport entertainment companies that put on multi-team college basketball events.
In late April, shortly after the transfer portal closes and rosters for the following year are largely set, a committee representing whatever organization or company is putting the tournament on will select one team from each of the six major conferences – the ACC, Big East, Big Ten, Big 12, Pac-12 and SEC – and two at-large teams from the remaining conferences. Considering the fragile state of the Pac-12, it could be removed from consideration and that at-large pool could be expanded to three or whatever amalgamation emerges from the remaining two Pac-12 schools and the Mountain West could simply assume the Pac-12’s role.
If this seems onerous from a planning standpoint for teams, it’s really not. Unlike in college football, college basketball programs regularly don’t have their schedules filled out until the summer, meaning a season-opening game in November may sometimes not be agreed to until June.
To avoid redundancy, maintain interest and foster something resembling a level playing field, a school cannot participate in the event in back-to-back years. It would be a single-elimination tournament, with no loser’s bracket or consolation games like many early season multi-team events feature.
Scheduling when exactly the games would take place can be tricky, namely because of the NFL’s desire to spread its seed as far as it can beyond its customary home on Sunday. Even unsightly contests like the Bears and Panthers that were outlawed generations ago by the Geneva Conventions draw in millions of viewers.
It would obviously take place the first week of the season and, to pique interest and continuity, it couldn’t be spread out over multiple weeks, meaning it would happen on back-to-back-to-back nights, which isn’t terribly dissimilar from how events like the Maui Invitational operate. But with three rounds of the tournament, it will have to conflict with one night in which there’s a standalone NFL game. We’ll pick Thursday as the lesser of two evils, as the matchups are usually less compelling and fewer people have Amazon Prime than they do ESPN. The four first-round games would happen throughout the day on Tuesday, the semifinals would be Wednesday and the championship would be Thursday.
Given the compressed schedule, the tournament would have to be held at a single site. It could theoretically take place at any NBA or college arena that has a large enough capacity, but three options immediately stand out – Madison Square Garden, Hinkle Fieldhouse or T-Mobile Arena in Las Vegas. Hinkle might be the most unrealistic of the bunch as it seats only about 9,000 and Butler – a college basketball team preparing diligently for its upcoming season – would need access to it. It doesn’t have to remain in one spot year after year. It could shift as part of a rotation, similar to what the Champions Classic does.
You’ve got good teams. You’ve got a relatively clear portion of the week, with this being a standalone event to open the season (all other teams would begin their seasons the following week). But what about stakes? Why should not only the viewer care, but the players and risk-averse coaches potentially playing three games in three nights? What do they get out of it?
If it’s the NCAA running the event, which wouldn’t be my preference, you’re very limited in terms of what can be offered. Though some of the teams in the tournament likely wouldn’t have to sweat out their postseason fate on Selection Sunday, an automatic berth in the NCAA Tournament could go to the winner as an inducement.
But if the NCAA isn’t involved, it gets a lot more fun. In the scenario in which the event is owned and operated by a company, a winner-take-all cash prize could be offered to the champion. Even in the age of loosened NIL rules, it would almost certainly be a violation for an active athlete to accept a cash payment and remain eligible, but perhaps their winning sum could be put into an account of some sort that can be waiting for them and be accessed once their collegiate career is over.
Even if the players aren’t immediately getting the money, there could be a big show of it at the end, with the victorious team standing on a podium, hoisting a trophy and having dollar bills falling from the rafters.
In a sport that frequently lacks a spectacle this time of the year, this would certainly qualify.
Why this makes sense
As uninspired as the opening few days of the 2023-24 college basketball schedule were, it’s a momentary lull.
On Friday, the fifth day of the season, Arizona played against Duke at Cameron Indoor Stadium in a matchup of top-15 teams. That same day, a top-10 Tennessee squad traveled to Wisconsin, San Diego State and BYU faced off, a ranked Texas A&M squad went on the road against Ohio State, and Princeton and Hofstra played in one of the better mid-major matchups you’ll see all year. Even when a game doesn’t seem appealing at first glance, it has the potential to surprise. Who would have thought James Madison would beat a top-five Michigan State team in its season-opener and follow it up three nights later with a double-overtime thriller against Kent State? College basketball has a tendency to deliver in the most unexpected instances, which is part of why I and countless others love the sport the way we do.
Even beyond this first week, there are reasons to be engaged. Next week, there’s the Champions Classic, which this season involves four of the sport’s top 16 teams. The week after that, we’ve got the Maui Invitational and the Battle 4 Atlantis.
It’s sufficient, sure, but it could be something more.
This eight-team tournament isn’t intended as some cure-all fix or a plan to save college basketball because, honestly, it doesn’t need saving.
In recent years, shortcomings of college basketball have too frequently been framed as existential threats. Networks like ESPN have either cut down their linear game inventory, altered the studio and halftime show structure or don’t feature much college basketball talk on their most visible debate shows, but that’s not a uniquely college basketball program. Any sport that’s not the NFL, NBA or, to a lesser extent, college football is facing that same dilemma.
As it exists now, it’s a sport with a high floor of interest and relevance, but a low ceiling. The existence of the NCAA Tournament and the passion that surrounds it guarantees a captivated audience over three glorious weeks – and TV ratings bear that out – but the four months that precede it are often ignored.
There’s nothing inherently wrong with that and the sport can lose a sense of its identity if it tirelessly chases after fans who largely don’t give a damn about it until it’s fashionable to do so. But, still, why not try something new?
After all, it can’t be much worse than what we have now.
(Photo: Bing AI)