NCAA Basketball: Are early season non-conference games too soft?

NCAA Basketball starts in early November. But the games don’t really get interesting until a few weeks later. Is there any way to improve on this?

The start of a new college basketball season is filled with excitement for fans. Without a preseason for college basketball, games start to matter right off the bat. Like college football, however, many of the top teams start their schedules off rather softly, often times not playing a lot of major teams.

The ideology behind this is simple, top teams don’t want to embarrass themselves early on in the season. So instead of going after the best from the get-go, they go after the worst. This period of play generally lasts up until Thanksgiving where teams then start to enter tournament play which is where they will face better competition.

Although it is understandable why teams do this, it may or may not be the best from the perspective of the fans. Every year college basketball fans get excited for the return of the season only to be bombarded with awful games within the first few weeks. Unless you’re a fan of teams like Duke and Kentucky, it is safe to assume that almost nobody will be joining you in the stands to watch your favorite team play against a mid-major.

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There have been some instances where teams have lost to teams that they thought they could easily beat early on in the season. For example in 2015 the St. John’s Red Storm went up against Incarnate Word, a small school in San Antonio. The Red Storm ended up getting humiliated losing 73-51 on their home court in what was supposed to be a cakewalk for the Big East team. The game right after that, the Red Storm then fell to the New Jersey Institute of Technology, another small low-major team.

This shows what can happen when top teams think that since the team they are playing doesn’t even belong on the same court. It seems as if the mentality for players going into these games is that they will blow the team out by 50 and have fun doing it. However, that is not always the case.

Now the counter argument to this is that these games are scheduled only because there is no preseason and what really matters is conference games and games later on in the season. Since the NCAA doesn’t allow for a lot of preseason games in any sport, many of the top coached and administrators are forced to do this in order to prepare their teams for the games that really matter later on in the season.

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Bottom line is these tune-up games are not interesting for fans to watch. Sure they are filled with crazy dunks and highlight reel plays, but they aren’t really worth anything and are not competitive by any means. Now the only solution to this is to have a preseason however it is unlikely that the NCAA will ever make that possible. So all fans can do is wait until late December, where college basketball really starts.

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