NCAA Basketball: Early tournament games in 2020-21 to get excited about

As NCAA Basketball fans continue to deal with never-seen-before realities, they can look forward to the 2020 early season tournaments. These tournaments can be a beacon for normalcy, for they will simply be a by-product of better times.

Every season in and around Thanksgiving, NCAA basketball teams spread across the country to partake in an early-season basketball tournament. This year’s slate of early-season tournaments will have an extra aura of excitement around them because fans missed the traditional madness that they have all come to expect in March.

Even though these are in fact ‘early-season tournaments’ and fans have the opportunity to witness their favorite team play several games already. These early-season tournaments offer teams an opportunity to not only play three games over four days against quality out-of-conference opponents, but it affords teams the opportunity to spend a weekend as a team.

There will be no argument from any avid NCAA basketball fan that the NCAA basketball schedule is a busy one. Teams routinely play a game in the middle of the week, then one on the weekend. At times these games require teams to fly three hours and fifteen minutes to Michigan State on Tuesday, then on Friday drive for over three hours on I-86 South to hit the hardwood versus Virginia Tech, such as Duke did during the 2019-20 season.

The existence of the early season tournaments seems at times like an artificial attempt to create a ‘November Madness’ strictly for marketing purposes. Many tournaments go unnoticed so early in the season, yet are not early enough to compare to the Clash of Champions.

In lieu of looking back at what we have all missed out on this year, let us look forward to ten early-season tournament games we need to get excited about.