Early season conference matchups like Iowa at Michigan State on Dec. 3 spice up the Big Ten’s season.getty images
Dave Gavitt spent years voicing the same message to his friend, Big Ten Commissioner Jim Delany: Yes, college basketball knows how to end a season with the popular NCAA Tournament. But, the former Big East commissioner would continue, college basketball is awful at starting a season. He’d complain time and again that top teams would load their early season schedules with cupcakes that usually produce noncompetitive games.
Delany took Gavitt’s remarks to heart and has worked to change that.
Early showcases like the ACC-Big Ten Challenge and the Maui Invitational have been regulars on the calendar for two decades. But the Big Ten looked for more ways to let its teams cut through the clutter, especially early in the season when they would run up against college football games.
For starters, the Big Ten scheduled conference basketball games on either side of the football championship game weekend, playing 14 league contests from Nov. 30 through Dec. 6 — a time when most other leagues are playing nonconference games.
Big Ten Network carried 12 of those games and “they were able to string together a nice couple days of promotion around it, letting fans know that this was happening,” said Kerry Kenny, the conference’s assistant commissioner who oversees basketball. “That allowed us something not many other conferences are doing — to have meaningful conference games at a time of year when you’ve got a platform that nobody else has for about a week.”
The Big Ten was so emboldened by those early December matchups that it started talking about scheduling conference games even earlier. Conference officials credit the more competitive schedules with increased TV ratings and interest for conference basketball games.
This trend is starting to catch on at other conferences, including the ACC, which has scheduled conference games as season openers for 2019-20 with eight matchups across Nov. 5-6. Four of those games will appear on ACC Network, which launches this August.
“We’re looking at going a little earlier,” Kenny said. “Does the first week of the season make sense? Does a Friday night before a home football game where you have the same two schools playing make sense?”
Other conferences are starting to follow the Big Ten’s model.
“The leagues that have gone to 20-game schedules will probably have to start their conference schedules earlier,” said Big East Commissioner Val Ackerman. “The challenge for college basketball is bringing attention to the games when football is still unfolding in those important football months of November and December and, to some degree, January.”
No amount of creative scheduling ever will take college basketball’s focus off March Madness. But the Big Ten believes it has found a way to make the game more relevant over the course of the entire season.
The Big Ten’s innovative scheduling also can be seen in how it slots games during the week. The conference used to have games on Tuesdays, Thursdays and during the weekend. This past season, it scheduled single games on Friday nights and Monday nights, and Kenny said the conference was happy with the ratings that came from those.
In the 75-day time frame from Jan. 2 through Selection Sunday in March, when fans are shifting out of football mode and into basketball, Big Ten teams played on 64 of those nights. The other power five conferences, plus the Big East, averaged 41.6 games within the same period.
“The great thing about the Big Ten is that the depth in that league is on par, if not better, than any league in the country,” said Dan Weinberg, CBS Sports’ executive vice president of programming. “The conference made some efforts to front-load their schedule. But I think that there’s enough quality of matchups and quality of programs in the league that it’s gotten spread out over the entire course of the season.”
That depth, which saw the Big Ten put a record eight teams in the NCAA Tournament this season, has allowed the league to spread out its schedule more than other conferences, Kenny said.
“Those extra 23 nights of having a Big Ten game on really allowed us to have a platform and an opportunity for people to be talking about Big Ten basketball,” Kenny said. “With all of our media partners, we have the ability to space out games and to have clear windows where there’s only one Big Ten game. That allows us a lot of flexibility.”
