1. Welcome to October. For many Americans, the 10th month of the calendar represents the leaves changing, the heart of the football season, the if you’re over 55, the World Series. For us, it means we’re talkin’ ’bout practice. Officially, college basketball practice won’t begin until two days from now — Friday, October 3 is this year’s earliest possible date for teams to start lacing them up — but with the preseason now basically here, you’ll be hit with a flurry of previews, prospectuses and all the rest of it in short order. Forty-four days until tipoff…
2. And just over two weeks until Midnight Madness, or what the modern-day equivalent has become with all of its high-profile musical acts, firework shows, and cults of personality. ESPNU on Tuesday announced its complete lineup for the October 17 programming, which begins at 6:00 PM ET and will cycle between both of last season’s national finalists — Connecticut and Kentucky — along with Arizona, Gonzaga, Florida and San Diego State over the next three hours. ESPN3 will offer the entire proceedings that same night from Harvard, Mercer, Kentucky, Connecticut, NC State and Florida Gulf Coast, if you’re not interested in all of the studio time cutting into the Madness festivities. And if you can’t wait a mere two weeks, ESPN3 will carry Kansas’ “Late Night in the Phog” on October 10 at 7:30 PM ET, if you want to get a first look at Cliff Alexander and Kelly Oubre (unsolicited advice: you do).
3. Speaking of ESPN’s wall-to-wall college basketball coverage, the organization also announced on Tuesday that Jay Williams and Seth Greenberg will replace Jalen Rose and Digger Phelps on this year’s version of College Gameday. As Matt Yoder describes in his writeup at Awful Announcing, Williams and Greenberg have both come on strong with their sharp studio analysis in recent years, and with the stale Phelps now retired and Rose focusing on his preferred NBA, this seems like a good crew to pair with host Rece Davis and Renaissance Man Jay Bilas. But the bigger news that came out of this report from our perspective is that ESPN is planning on finally, finally, finally moving to the College Gameday football model, where the group camps out at the campus site of the week’s biggest game, regardless of whether ESPN is carrying it on prime time. Certainly there will be some overlap — do we really believe that Duke-UNC won’t be one of those games? — but this is a long-awaited improvement.
4. Let’s talk about prestigious public universities that play college basketball, shall we? Out west, the People’s Republic of California at Berkeley has decided that a descending APR score along with middling graduation rates does not befit a school that ranks among the top 10 universities in the world. An AP report stated that Cal is likely to adopt recommendations made by a task force that will raise admissions standards for its student-athletes. Let’s just call this what it is: the Stanford Envy Rule. Given that a certain rival school a bit south and across the San Francisco Bay from Berkeley has managed to figure out a way to win in both football and basketball while retaining high APR scores (1,000) and graduation rates (83%), it was inevitable that Golden Bears’ brass was going to try something to fix the problem. It may very well improve the academic side of the equation; the athletic side, however, may need new head coach Cuonzo Martin to find more diamonds in the rough.
5. In the Southwest, the Behemoth Otherwise Known as the Athletic Department at the University of Texas at Austin has decided that its $165.7 million in annual revenue (FY13) isn’t enough to unilaterally fund the construction of a new basketball arena to replace the sterile on-campus Erwin Center. Speaking to a local civic group earlier this week, Texas athletic director Steve Patterson told the crowd that the cost of a new $500 million arena should, at least in part, be shouldered by the taxpaying citizens of the Lone Star State. His underlying argument: that the city of Austin has enjoyed the free services of a nice mid-sized arena for 35 years without having “invested a nickel” in its construction or operation. Wow. Of course, Patterson’s flaw here is that he’s asking for public funding for a basketball arena in an area that’s lukewarm at best about the sport. Why not just build another Godzillatron and be done with it?

Bennet Hayes is an RTC columnist. He can be reached @HoopsTraveler.

Aaand we’re back. Sort of. Today marks the official return of practice for college basketball players across the country, but unlike in years past, there will be no festive Midnight Madness celebration to announce that we are underway – at least not yet. A new NCAA initiative to allow programs more practice time before their opening games was passed this offseason, and teams are now able to use their 30 days of preseason practice over the span of six weeks, instead of the four weeks it had been in preseasons past. Great, you say — perhaps we will have a cleaner, more efficient brand of basketball ready for opening tip? That has to be the hope, as the extra time should allow for a smoother transition into the year, at least on paper. But in a sport where tradition and ceremony often delivers much of the impact, will the extra weeks of practice improve the play on the floor enough to offset a potential depreciation to the meaning of Midnight Madness?

Will Midnight Madness Suffer As A Result Of The New Early Opening To Practice?

It’s hard to know how direct a response this rule change is to the game scores that are getting lower and lower and the accompanying grumblings that are getting louder and louder, but it feels like an effort by the NCAA to raise early-season quality of play. While the actual practice time (30 days) remains the same, stretching it out over the course of six weeks should help keep players from feeling overwhelmed, and also offer them the chance to recover and work on individual skills on off days. Nobody is claiming these two weeks will advance basketball 10 years worth of quality, but there’s no way the extra time can’t help improve the product of November and December basketball.

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