For years now, fans and critics of the sport alike have talked about “fixing” college basketball in terms that would lead one to believe there might be an undiscovered formula that will one day make the sport more popular than the NFL during the winter months.
One of the primary talking points in these persuasive spiels used to center around college basketball’s opening night. It took place on a Friday in the heart of football season, there were never any notable games between ranked teams; basically it always came and went without the casual American sports fan even realizing it. It was an event worthy of criticism, even if the larger argument about the sport being irrevocably damaged was itself deeply flawed.
The reality is, college basketball isn’t broken. It doesn’t need fixing. It does, however, need some tweaking. So does every other major American sport. Now some of the tweaks that need to be made — I don’t know if you’ve been following the news at all over the past 25 months or so — are larger and more problematic than others. Some have already been remedied.
College basketball has issues that demand attention. Opening night is no longer one of those. In fact, college hoops’ curtain-raising event has evolved to the point where you can effectively argue it’s one of the best of all the major sports in this country.
For starters, the season no longer tips off on a Friday, an evening where it was already competing with football and where whatever storylines it produced were destined to be decimated the moment the full college football slate kicked off at noon the next day. Competing with election results still isn’t ideal (baby steps), but it does provide college basketball with an unshared sports spotlight. It also gives the sport an opportunity to maintain its grip on that spotlight deeper into the week if something significant — like, say, a Duke freshman showing the world that he’s a cinder block bitten by a radioactive spider who now pays basketball — transpires on opening night.
Second, moving the Champions Classic to the season’s first night was a no-brainer. The annual double-header featuring Duke, Kentucky, Kansas and Michigan State was already an annual lock to bring in some of the highest pre-tournament TV ratings of the year, and it was already viewed by most as the season’s unofficial starting point. Removing the “unofficial” from the equation made too much sense not to do it.
In the first year of the Champions Classic being played on night one, Zion Williamson and No. 3 Duke captured the full focus of the sports world by blitzing No. 2 Kentucky, 118-84, a throttling which marked the worst loss of the John Calipari era in Lexington. The dominant performance by the Blue Devils didn’t just remain the primary sports discussion topic for the remainder of the work week, it laid the foundation for what would become the primary pre-tournament storyline of the entire 2018-19 college basketball season.
That’s how you do an opening night.
For an encore, year two of the Champions Classic will merely feature No. 3 Kansas and No. 4 Duke tipping things off inside Madison Square Garden at 7, and No. 1 Michigan State and No. 2 Kentucky doing the same about two and a half hours later. Final Four Saturday is the only other day on the college basketball calendar where a matchup between the third and fourth best teams in the sport could be the undercard. It’s the first time the top two teams in college basketball have faced one another on the season’s opening night, and the first time the Champions Classic has boasted the top four teams in the country.
If you don’t care about that, it isn’t because college basketball isn’t giving you the best it has to offer, it’s simply because you’re unwilling to devote any attention to a secondary interest while your primary one is still standing smack in the middle of center stage. There isn’t anything college hoops can do about that. We’ll see you after the Super Bowl. Don’t ask us to convince you Gonzaga is good.
To make the pot even sweeter in 2019, the ACC is giving us actual, real life conference games that matter on night one. No. 5 Louisville heads to Miami to play the first basketball game on the new ACC Network, while Virginia Tech is at Clemson and Georgia Tech is at NC State. If that still isn’t enough, we’ve also got a bonafide, traditional non-conference showdown on night one with No. 20 Saint Mary’s traveling to play Wisconsin inside the always hostile Kohl Center in, uh, Sioux Falls, South Dakota..
One of the most-cited criticisms of college basketball is that games during the sport’s regular season doesn’t matter because of the size and importance of the NCAA tournament. It’s a ridiculous argument. Everything matters in college basketball. Kansas defeating or losing to Duke tonight could absolutely wind up being the difference between the Jayhawks getting a No. 1 seed or a No. 2 seed on Selection Sunday. That affects not only KU’s tournament prospects, but the teams that wind up in the same region as they do, and the teams that would have wound up in their same region had a different result occurred all the way back on Nov. 5.
Having said that, the stakes here are certainly different than they are in college football, where being ill-equipped to perform on night one can immediately eliminate you from even having an opportunity to play for the sport’s top prize three months later. Resiliency is more significantly rewarded in college basketball, and it’s smart for the sport to use that checkmark in its favor when it comes to early season scheduling.
There are holes on the college basketball calendar, to be sure. The sport hits a bit of a lull in December when programs are forced to schedule around finals and the students head home for winter break. With that established road block in place, college hoops has to have enough built up momentum from November to break through the barrier and transition seamlessly into the new year. With the sport’s new loaded opening night, its host of high-profile non-conference games in weeks two and three, and then the non-stop tournament games at all hours of the day during Thanksgiving Week, it’s safe to say that it’s doing all it can.
Enjoy night one of this wonderful five month journey. For now and for years to come, it promises to be significant.