Chaos! New college basketball start date wreaking havoc on scheduling for this season
Mike Morrell was looking forward to bringing his UNC Asheville team to the Smith Center on November 10 to open the season at North Carolina, the Tar Heels’ usual early season home game against an in-state team. When the NCAA pushed the start of the basketball season back two weeks, that game was suddenly caught in coronavirus limbo.
The Tar Heels only have one spot left on their abridged schedule, and they’ll play one of the nonconference opponents scheduled later in the season if they can rearrange the date. That’ll leave UNCA out in the cold.
“The people who were already after the start date, we’re contractually obligated to doing everything we can to make those games work,” said UNC senior associate athletic director Clint Gwaltney, who oversees basketball scheduling. “Then we’d ask UNC Asheville to push off a year and maybe play them next year. We’ve been up front with everybody. We’ve done all we can.”
UNC Asheville would like to find a way to keep that game on the schedule, not only because of the $90,000 guarantee but because it’s a bus trip and probably the safest way to play a big-time opponent. But it’s clearly at the mercy of forces outside anyone’s control.
“We really wanted to play that game (this year),” Morrell said Wednesday on a webinar hosted by the university. “It also generates a lot of funds for the university. Right now that game is fluid.”
Fluid is a good word for the entire basketball scheduling landscape at the moment.
“Everyone’s scrambling,” said Duke deputy athletic director and basketball scheduler Jon Jackson, who has been on his phone nearly nonstop for a week.
Last Wednesday, the NCAA announced the college basketball season would start Nov. 25 instead of Nov. 10 to give teams more time to prepare amid the pandemic. That prompted the immediate and frantic updating of every previously settled nonconference schedule in the country. For basketball schedulers, it’s a nightmare scenario of uncontrollable variables: parsing signed contracts, uncertainty about conference schedules, questions about safety protocols.
ACC basketball schedule delayed
Already, all of the foundations of the basketball scheduling world — where bigger teams pay smaller teams to visit, where mid-majors try to find opportunities to win resume games, where TV networks broker attractive matchups — have been upended by the pandemic, at every level, from the Power 5 to the one-bid leagues. There are no absolutes.
The ACC conference schedule, released abnormally late on September 12 last year and usually complete not later than the end of August, may not be finished until October.
Throw in the delayed start, unavoidable and pragmatic as it may have been, and it’s chaos.
Duke, for example, had four games in the lost early season window. But one of those was the Champions Classic, which will be pushed back and played in Orlando. That meant rearranging that part of the already-set schedule. And with schedules cut from 31 to 27 games, everyone’s had to cut back.
Even that figure was controversial: Twenty-seven games is the maximum only if a team plays in a multi-team event, or MTE, like the Battle 4 Atlantis or Maui Invitational. Otherwise, it’s 25. North Carolina athletic director Bubba Cunningham spoke for many when he said he was hoping the NCAA would have chosen a flat number, with schools chafing at the NCAA’s insistence on playing in a neutral-site MTE in the middle of a pandemic to get those two extra games.
Duke intends to pull out of the Battle 4 Atlantis — which will be played in South Dakota instead of the Bahamas — and is trying to schedule its own MTE in Durham, one focused on the program’s increased emphasis on social justice led by assistant coach Nolan Smith. But since Duke’s nonconference schedule is already crowded with the Champions Classic and ACC-Big Ten Challenge, there are a lot of moving parts.
“It’s a shell game,” Duke’s Jackson said.
North Carolina, meanwhile, was supposed to go back to Hawaii this season, but the Maui Invitational will be played in Asheville instead, a short in-state trip to Roy Williams’ hometown.
That made things easier for Gwaltney than most of his peers. With the Maui/Asheville Invitational, the CBS Sports Classic against UCLA, the ACC-Big Ten Challenge and 20 ACC games, North Carolina only had two open spots left. One was filled by an existing game. Gwaltney only has the one date to rearrange on his to-do list.
The other three games the Blue Devils lost were guarantee games where Duke was going to pay opponents to come play at Cameron. That’s an important part of the college basketball economy that’s been completely disrupted by COVID-19.
No one wants to pay guarantees when there won’t be any tickets sold, and while that’s understood on both sides, it complicates the delicate dance between opponents. Atlantic 10 commissioner Bernadette McGlade said Wednesday one Power 5 conference has capped all guarantees at $35,000, a third of the normal rate.
Losing out on pay dates
That’s bad news for conferences like the Big South, where getting a check for a trip to a Power 5 arena is a big part of the economic picture, especially for schools that don’t play football. UNC Asheville had two of those games scheduled, at North Carolina and at Miami. It may not play either.
“To schedule on the new dates, each school’s having to cancel additional games that were already scheduled,” McGlade said. “That kind of musical chairs is going on right now. They are also individually having to reschedule the games to accommodate the MTEs right now. It’s all happening pretty quickly, on a daily basis, since last Thursday.
“Once the dust settles, probably by the end of this week, we have a set of open dates at the end of December that would have been exam dates when we wouldn’t have had games since most institutions are doing exams early.”
The availability of those weeks in December is another wrinkle for conference schedulers as they consider whether to try to gather in pods or travel to road games and how best to organize a schedule to best comply with COVID-19 requirements.
Colleges don’t have the finances to support a hermetically sealed NBA-style bubble, but they are talking about getting together in common sites under common testing protocols. Louisville coach Chris Mack advertised on Twitter for opponents to join the Cardinals in an on-campus nonconference bubble and event organizers are pitching casinos and convention centers as potential sites to knock out a bunch of games at once.
Those questions are universal, from the ACC to the Big South.
“We are going to move some conference games into the December, pre-Christmas, time frame,” Big South commissioner Kyle Kallander said. “But when will those games be played? When will there be opportunities around nonconference play as well?” Are we going to be able to play single games or do we go to a bubble after Christmas break? Do we try pods to allow us to play multiple games at one time?”
No one really knows. But while they juggle the unknowns, they’re in a big hurry to figure it out.
“We’ve got a lot of games after the 25th that are still locked in,” Morrell, the UNC Asheville coach, said. “There’s still a lot of fluidity to come with what our schedule actually looks like.”
This story was originally published September 24, 2020 at 9:42 AM.
