Early-Season College Hoops Matchups

As billions of my long-time readers know, I like to put out a very early look at the first week of college football each February or March. I'd like to do something similar for college basketball (and I sort of do, when I do my annual preview of the Coaches vs. Cancer Classic), but it's much harder to do a similar thing for college basketball.

One reason is that it takes a long time for schools to put together a basketball schedule. Universities will be hammering out details well into summer and probably into autumn. It takes until pretty close to the season for all the Division 1 schools to say, "okay, here is our schedule" to where it can be reliably released to the media. It takes even longer for television details to be sorted out.

Another reason is my own eccentricities. As each week of college football commences, especially early in the season when there are a lot of intriguing one-off non-conference games, I'd rather wait for each week to pass before I take a gander at what next week has in store.

Such a method is a lot less practical in college basketball, but I'd still rather not know the entire schedule landscape at once if I can avoid it.

Nevertheless, the bigger pre-season tournaments tend to release their fields pretty early, and that's the case with the Big 10/ACC Challenge.

As a diehard Big 10 fan, I love this series; it gives the Big Ten the formidable task of conquering the premiere conference in all of college basketball. Usually, they come up short. Indeed, they are just 2-10 in the 12 years of the competition. But those 2 wins were in the last two years.

Additionally, the Big Ten does not have a single school above .500 in the history of the competition. Two are right at .500, and they will both face tall orders to get over the hump this year.

One of those teams is Ohio State, who hosts Duke on November 29th in what is clearly the headliner of this year's competition. Given how strong both programs have been over most of the last decade, it's surprising that this is only the second time they have hooked up in the competition (Duke beat them by 15 in 2002). A lot of pride is at stake for the Blue Devils; they've only lost once in the history of the tournament.

That loss was in 2009 to the only other Big Ten school to manage a .500 record in the competition's history, Wisconsin. This year, the Badgers will travel down Tobacco Road to face the other big kahuna of the ACC and its defending champion, North Carolina.

Both the ACC and the Big Ten had three teams solidly in front of the fourth place team in their conference. Ohio State, Wisconsin, Duke, and North Carolina were all among those schools.

Who are the other two? Purdue in the Big Ten and Florida State in the ACC. So they play each other, right? Nope.

Florida State will travel to East Lansing to take on Michigan State. Although they were down last year, the Spartans still carry a great deal of college basketball cache.

The same cannot be said for Miami, which is the dance partner tourney organizers hooked up with Purdue. It's a head-scratcher, and although it will likely be an easy W for Purdue (they are at home and will have Robbie Hummel back), they can't be too pleased. Purdue's great season last year was especially outstanding given they were missing their best player. They should have been rewarded with the TV ratings that would have gone along with playing Duke, North Carolina, or at least Florida State.

That leaves a lot of mediocre teams (judging by last year's record alone) battling it out with a lot of other mediocre teams. The only other matchup that carries some intrigue is Boston College, the only school in either conference undefeated in the ACC/Big Ten Challenge, hosting Penn State, who made their first NCAA appearance in ten years last year.

The Maui Invitational last year featured soon-to-be-national-champs UConn, who took down the Maui tourney title as well. Other than that, it was a pretty mediocre field featuring the likes of Virginia, Oklahoma, and Wichita State.

They are very much "back" this year, though, with Duke and Kansas headlining it. Memphis, who is likely to be a top-10 team going into 2011, will be there too, as will Michigan, UCLA, Georgetown, and Tennessee in year one, post-Bruce Pearl.

There will be four more to-be-announced teams, but they will not play in Hawaii. No, they will play on the mainland under the banner of the Maui Invitational. It will work like this, courtesy of College Hoops Journal:

"Here's how the 12-team format will shake out. The first slate of games will be played at 'the Maui-bound schools with three of the four mainland teams playing two games and the other playing one. The four mainland teams will play two doubleheaders at one of those schools on Nov. 19-20. The championship round will remain the same at the Lahaina Civic Center with all 12 games shown on one of the ESPN networks.'"

Nope, I don't understand it, either.

Finally, I'd like to pour a little of my 40 out for the other big preseason tourney of my youth, the Great Alaska Shootout.

Yes, it still exists, but only as a shadow of its former self (Houston Baptist vs. Southern Utah State, anyone?) Better writers than I have explained its demise.

I did watch as much as I could last year on the G.A.S. website, for like $12 or $18 bucks, and I'll do it again this year, if they hold it. Call it principle. Call it nostalgia. Or call it another one of my eccentricities.