Fixing the college basketball schedule

college basketball schedule

College basketball celebrates the end of its season better than any sport in the country. There is nothing in life more exiting than non-stop hoops during the three-week sprint of the NCAA Tournament. We love college basketball and would love to see it succeed. To do that, we’re going to need to fix when the games are being played in the sports calendar. The college basketball schedule started earlier than it ever has this year, which is the wrong direction if it wants to be as great as it possibly could be.

The sport is turning into baseball, living in the past talking about the good ol’ days of the Big East and how much better the sport used to be when we knew all the players. The one-and-done rule can be a reason to blame for this. Instead of seeing guys three or four years, we see them for a few months before shipping them off to the NBA.

But above anything else, one thing gets in the way of college basketball’s success.

Football.

College basketball overlaps with the NFL and college football far too much, and it doesn’t have to be that way. Every weekend is dominated by football from Labor Day through the first week of February. Instead of trying to fight America’s love for football by doing the same thing year after year, college basketball should make a drastic change to its schedule.

Now that we’re done with football (sorry, American Alliance of Football), casual sports fans still are not clamoring for college basketball just yet. The main topic of conversation the week after the Super Bowl was the NBA trade deadline.

People will slowly ease into college basketball season in the coming weeks but if you’ve already missed the majority of the regular season, what’s the point in trying to get caught up? More and more, sports fans are waiting till March when the conference tournaments begin. By the time we see the bracket on Selection Sunday, we’ll finally be all in.

College basketball starts in early November and ends in early April. A five-month season essentially turns into a one-month season because it spent the majority of its time competing with a superior product, which football is.

The media would love to see a change with more things to talk about in the non-football months of the year. I run this website and am scrambling to figure out what we’re going to do in the long offseason. How often do national radio or TV shows discuss college basketball storylines at any point during its regular season? It’s incredibly small relative to what football receives.

If you’ve read this far, you’re probably waiting for the solution. Well here it is.

Start the college basketball regular season on the first Thursday after New Year’s. College basketball did a great job opening the season with a bang this year with the Champions Classic involving some of the top programs in the country. Do that exact same thing to create some buzz right out of the gate.

The first month of the season should be dedicated to the non-conference portion of the schedule. Die hards hoops junkies will be watching the Big Ten-ACC Challenge and other exciting non-conference events, but by the time we get to life post-Super Bowl, we’ll be ready to roll with conference play.

But what about our beloved March Madness? Well, let’s change a few letters and make it a May Madness.

We should be about a month into the college basketball season right now. Instead, we’re forcing the average sports fan to go into the NCAA Tournament unprepared. It’s too late to cram for the test at this point. People in general hate any type of change, but in the long run this would be better for the fans, schools, media, coaches and players for all the extra exposure college basketball would receive by moving the start date two months later.

We can do better as a sports world, and we need to make a change to the college basketball schedule.

Photo courtesy of WVUSports.com