Despite what you might have heard, men’s college basketball has enjoyed a significant increase in TV viewership the last few years. For example, during the 2023-24 season, Disney-owned networks (ABC, ESPN, ESPN2) drew an average of 554,000 viewers over 350-plus games, which was up six percent from 2021-22. In 2024, FS1 had its best men’s college basketball season yet with a 17% bump in viewership over the previous season.
Whether this is an outlier or a trend is not important. What’s important is that college hoops takes advantage of this spike in interest. I’ve got a great first step: Move a bulk of the conference games to November and December and play more of those juicy non-conference games after the New Year.
Since the beginning of time, college basketball has constructed its schedule in largely the same fashion — non-conference games in November and December, conference play in January and February. The schedule was constructed like this because non-conference games were seen as a way of preparing teams for the inevitable “conference grind,” back when conferences were between 8-10 teams and winning the regular season conference championship actually mattered. Conferences were more intimate, more competitive, more identifiable to fans and conference play generated an energy for the sport akin to a bear waking from hibernation.
All of that buzz about conference regular seasons has been lost. Conference realignment is one reason. As these conferences have grown into monstrosities, the enthusiasm over many of the matchups has dwindled. Too many bad teams taking up space in the bottom halves of these leagues; zero historical significance or relationships; and too many bad games dotting the television airwaves, serving as a bad representation of the men’s college basketball product. Not to mention the fact that as these conferences have grown, the leagues have been forced to abandon the home-and-home scheduling format and resort to unbalanced conference schedules.
In other words, the degree of difficulty of the conference schedule varies from team to team, thus diminishing the value of the regular season and its championship. No one cares about the regular season races anymore, outside of perhaps the Big East, which is the only power conference playing a traditional home-and-home schedule (at least until that conference inevitably expands).
The other drawback to these conference regular seasons — which have grown to 20 games in some conferences — is that they become self-fulling prophecies. If your conference as a whole performs well in the non-conference, your NCAA Tournament analytics will only continue to get better in conference play. Conversely, if your conference underperforms in the non-conference, it drastically handicaps every team in that conference analytically, as in the ACC. You could be a good team playing at home against a bad team, win that game and go down in the NCAA Evaluation Tool (NET), the primary metric in building the NCAA Tournament bracket.
That shouldn’t be. Particularly at a time in the sports calendar when football has ended, more and more people begin to watch the sport of college basketball and discussion begins to build about NCAA Tournament worthiness.
One of the many side effects of the transfer portal is that it’s taking teams longer to gel. Teams are not even close to being finished products in the months of November and December, but they are arguably playing their most important games in those months. Nothing moves the needle more when it comes to NCAA Tournament viability and selection than non-conference games. Many of these matchups that we see played in November and December are the most entertaining games in our sport, yet they’re being played at a time when the sport is playing in front of its smallest audience.
Hence, my suggestion for a flip. Let’s play the bulk of the conference games in the months of November and December. Keep the Feast Week tournaments around Thanksgiving, but otherwise, knock out a good bulk of the conference matchups in the first two months of the season. Conferences can save their “best” conference matchups (Duke v Carolina, for example) for later in the year. Then, the majority of these conference games that, let’s be honest, are not nearly as compelling as some of the heavy hitting non-conference games we see in November and December, can be played while the majority of the world is watching football.
Another benefit of “flipping” is that the non-conference matchups created in January and February would not only best serve the sport as an entertainment proposition, they would also fuel an NCAA Tournament discussion that becomes the lifeblood of college basketball in those months. The NCAA Tournament is truly one of the great playoff events in all of sports. Because conference play really doesn’t tell us anything analytically vis-a-vis the NET, and because teams are very different in January and February than they were in the first two months of a season, we’re not getting the most accurate picture of who is worthy of selection.
There are, of course, hurdles to this suggestion. It would take a massive overhaul of how schedules are currently done and it’s hard to imagine commissioners and athletic directors aligning on something that’s unrelated to football — or aligning on anything at all for that matter!
A second hurdle would be getting coaches to schedule great non-conference matchups in the two months prior to Selection Sunday. If you play a great non-conference game in November, there’s obviously plenty of time to develop and recover from that loss. Are coaches willing to play tough games in the weeks leading up to Selection Sunday? If the “good of the game” argument doesn’t inspire them, then perhaps part of the solution could be to move events like The Champions Classic and the SEC-ACC Challenge, for example, to January and February.
College basketball is a strong product, but the competition for eyeballs during the regular season has never been tougher. It’s a big challenge that requires some big ideas to meet it. Shaking up how we do the schedule is a great place to start.
