Basketball's Early Start Doesn't Necessarily Get It Noticed

As I sat in my office the other night I was witness to the start of ESPN’s Basketball Marathon, a concocted collection of games at weird times that allows the sports empire to put games on its “family of networks” over a 24-hour span.

They were very proud of this marathon. The guys doing the game I was watching noted this marathon of games about once every 45 seconds. At this point, I no longer want to hear the word marathon. Not about the one in Boston, New York, and, now, certainly not this one.

For all of this network’s efforts to come up with viable content, which it overly hypes in the process, here we are in mid-November with college basketball season well underway. And two or three years after the games began starting earlier I still ask myself ‘why?’

The NCAA still allows teams to play only 27 games. Yet, what used to be a season start time of on or around Thanksgiving weekend has been moved up to November 10th, or thereabouts. It can’t have anything to do with any type of respect to exam schedules. Teams used to take time off for those when they began around Thanksgiving.

The answer is likely the same one for pretty much all of the other drastic changes we’ve seen in college athletics within the last 20 years from erratic kick-off times to basketball marathons that have college kids playing games at 1am local time. TV. Starting the regular season two or three weeks earlier allows for some better programming on weeknights than just showing another round of Texas Hold ‘Em.

It’s all fine and good and it provides a great benefit to the schools and the sports financially.

But a great example of how moving the start date of the season up can pretty much lead to the unintended consequence of taking attention away from the game comes from this past weekend. Clemson won a tournament in Charleston by defeating Temple Sunday afternoon. In most newspapers around the state, news of the Tigers’ involvement in the tourney was no higher than page two as football takes the day in terms of placement.

The Tigers did luck out from the fact that the football game this past Saturday was scheduled for noon (because, of course, of TV) while the basketball team’s second round game tipped at about 8pm. What if the football team had played at 7:45pm? Even the most ardent Tiger fan would likely turn his or her attention more to the football game than the basketball contest.

Other than football, pretty much the start of any season usually flies under the radar until you get into the meat of the schedule. This is somewhat the case in college basketball as teams tend to play their “cupcake” games early. But in the past, at least basketball was starting as football was ending or already over so it had its own stage.

Now, it might be five or six games into a season before fans are fully tuned in to their team as its played in the shadow of the football season. And you can thank the TV folks, at least in part, for this early-season tune-out.