With so much focus on NCAA tournament seeding, the men’s game has lost sight in what made it so much fun. Now, it’s time to take notes from the women’s game.
The NCAA tournament is an important event, that much is certain. It’s one of the five-most viewed sporting events every year, provides a number of opportunities for programs to gain attention and provides every participating program with a nice chunk of cash. The further you go, more of all these things come along with it.
But with its importance, the regular season has suffered because of it. Rule changes have made games unwatchable as referees try to enforce the new rules. High-profile teams refuse to play good mid-majors and, in turn, good mid-majors are forced to play non-Division I programs just to fill their schedule.
Perhaps the most important impact of the NCAA tournament’s importance, though, is that teams are no longer willing to play away from home, which has led to a major increase in neutral-court games.
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Though those neutral-court games provide a nice benefit to teams both big and small (a sometimes fat check), it’s taken away what’s good about college athletics.
Think of the best college basketball games you’ve seen in the past 10 years. How many of them came during neutral-court games in the regular season? Maybe a few, right? Now, how many of them were played on somebody else’s home turf in a true road game for one team, complete with raucous crowds, weird chants and, yes, the occasional court storm?
What college basketball currently lacks is a willingness to play away from home, and it starts at the top.
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When other programs in the nation see that Duke, perhaps the biggest name in college athletics regardless of the sport, plays one true road game in three years and is almost always rewarded with a high seed in the NCAA tournament, why should they put their necks on the line by playing at somebody else’s house, risk a loss and have their tournament seed fall from fourth to sixth because of that one loss in December?
Things have gotten better in this area as programs such as Kentucky (home-and-homes with Arizona State and UCLA), Virginia (California and Villanova) and North Carolina (Texas, recently concluded series with Kentucky and Northern Iowa) have all taken the hint that the tournament selection committee has put forth to teams: start playing true road games and you’ll be rewarded later on.
Of course, not everybody has caught on yet and it’s gotten to a very sad, disappointing point.
However, all hope is not lost. Things can change, but it’s going to take a willingness to step out of their comfort zone and an ability to learn from the women’s game.
What women’s college basketball has done so well is any and all programs, no matter how prominent, are generally willing to play against anybody anywhere, something the men’s game can’t say.
Part of the reason why these top programs are willing to do this is for growth and awareness of the sport. Of course, the men’s game doesn’t have to search for attention while the women’s game is still looking for it.
But how the women are out there willing to play everybody helps not only the sport, but every program involved with these games.
Take, for example, Notre Dame. The women have been at or near the top of the women’s college basketball world for quite some time. While they’re not the top dog, they’re always close to the top. Rather than rest assured that they’re a far superior team than most of the nation, they’re willing to test themselves in places other teams wouldn’t even think about going to.
Just this year, the Fighting Irish played true road games at South Dakota State, Valparaiso, TCU and Saint Joseph’s, as well as at No. 1 Connecticut. Notre Dame won all four of those first games and fell at Connecticut. Two of the wins were rather lopsided while two others were less than 20-point wins and one was an 11-point road win.
Even though they won all those games and two of them were completely one-sided affairs, they went out and played the games. Notre Dame very easily could just stay home every year, play whatever schools will travel to them and call it a schedule.
Rather than doing that, though, they’re not only toughening up their schedule by traveling more than they really have to, they’re also helping these smaller schools by playing “their Super Bowl” on their own turf.
Think about it for a second. Other than North Carolina’s annual trips to one of their seniors’ home areas for a game (Northern Iowa this year), what other major men’s program willingly goes out and plays true road games at mid-majors? A very small number, if any at all.
It’s not just Notre Dame that’s willing to go out and play smaller programs on the road for the women, though. Of the teams ranked in the preseason Associated Press Top 25 poll, 24 of them played true road games in the non-conference for a total of 70 scheduled games.
Compare that to the men’s preseason poll where 24 of their 25 ranked teams also played true road games in the non-conference but just 38 games, a little more than half as often as the women.
When men’s programs do go on the road, though, they generally like to at least play ranked teams so it’s “worth their time” and doesn’t hurt their potential NCAA tournament seeding.
Thirty-six percent of the total men’s non-conference true road games were played at teams that turned out to be ranked at the time of the contest, 14 total games. Compare this to the women, who totaled 26 such games, also 36 percent of their scheduled games.
Though this number may feel like a big separation, the proportions of them make them about equal, but it’s the success of both sides that tells the biggest story.
Of those 14 true road games at ranked opponents, the men went 4-10, a .286 winning percentage, with Wisconsin, Arizona, Butler and Iowa State being the only ones to pick up wins. As for the women, they went 8-18, a .308 win percentage. Essentially, the men have slightly less success at ranked opponents than the women, though the numbers favor a slim divide.
Also separating the women from the men is that their top teams, the ones usually at the top of the rankings or expected to be a Final Four contender most years, are far more likely to play on the road than the men.
In the men’s preseason top 25, teams ranked in the top five have played a grand total of five true road with a 1-4 record in those games. Kentucky playing at Kansas still has to be played later this month. On the women’s side, preseason top five teams played 14 such games with a 12-2 record, still almost three times as many games played.
Looking even further at these numbers paints a much clearer picture on how the women’s game is miles ahead of the men’s when it comes to competition.
- Both men’s and women’s top 25s had just one team not play a single true road game in the non-conference: Duke for the men and Baylor for the women, both ranked No. 5 in the AP preseason poll.
- Only two men’s teams played more than two of these games: Oklahoma and Wichita State. Compare that to the women’s side, who had 16 teams play three or more true road games, including Connecticut (four) and Notre Dame (five), ranked one and three in the preseason poll, respectively.
- There was just one team on the women’s side that played just one true road game (Texas A&M) with 10 such teams on the men’s side. Of those 10, though, three of them were forced to play the game due to conference challenge affiliation (Indiana @ Duke, Notre Dame @ Illinois and Purdue @ Pittsburgh).
- Overall, the men went 18-20 in true road games in the non-conference while the women went 47-22. One game on the women’s side was cancelled due to weather conditions.
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Perhaps the final figure is the most telling in why women’s college basketball programs are more willing to play on the road than men’s teams are. It’s no secret that the top of women’s college ball is leaps and bounds above the rest of the country while, especially this year, there’s far less hierarchy in terms of talent in the men’s game.
That much has been highlighted through the year with the mid-majors’ success against Power 5 programs.
However, because the women are ready and willing to play true road games at unconventional schools, it gives those teams a better look at how they will fare in difficult situations.
Playing on the road isn’t easy, and going into a hostile territory where you’re playing a team on their home turf and a win would make their year, their program, it’s often difficult to overcome.
Yet they still do it while the men sit in their little box of comfort where the only important thing is NCAA tournament seeding. And that’s the saddest reality of all.
Shouldn’t teams want to be targeted? Shouldn’t they want to be pushed and challenged and really figure out if they are what they think they could be? Are teams no longer willing to take on all comers, to really test themselves and be the golden goose that every team wants to take home as their prize?
Because the answer to all of these questions is yes but nobody’s taking that issue with pride anymore, it’s caused college basketball to suffer. It’s the reason why everybody’s trying to change it. Everybody’s got an idea on how to improve the regular season, including this unconventional idea by Daniel Uthmann of USA Today Sports.
Except this isn’t money in the bank. You can’t just put teams into a tournament for a spot to get back into the NCAA tournament based on what they did the year before. Would you really think N.C. State would deserve to be in that tournament? That’d be like putting Bray Wyatt into the MITB match just because of something that he did nine months ago. It doesn’t work.
Instead, ditch the unconventional and go back to the conventional: play true home-road games. Play mid-majors on their turf. If you have to get them to agree to play at your place twice in the next five years to counter it, so be it, but give them a shot. Let them have their Super Bowl in November rather than March.
Think how big of a deal Valparaiso hosting Kentucky just once would be, what that could do for their program, what that would signify to the rest of the country? A top mid-major hosting a top national title contender?
What’s cooler than that? Lose that game? Big deal, move on. True road games offer less of a hit to NCAA tournament seeding and more impact on it with wins. Lose and it means there’s work to do. Win and you’ve got a solid victory to your credit moving forward.
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The more true road games that are played in college basketball, the better the moment is for both teams, the players, their programs and, most importantly, the fans. Neutral court games, while nice, don’t provide the same sort of pure enjoyment from a viewer perspective as a true home-road game. You can keep your neutral court games, but go out on a limb.
Play at the small guy’s place once in a while, give yourself a true challenge and quit coddling your teams.
But it may never happen. Instead, we’ll just get some more money-making neutral-court games popping up all over the place that have little significance in the end. We’ll still get Duke staying at home while the Arkansas-Pine Bluffs have to travel the total distance around the earth just to fill a schedule.
It doesn’t have to be this way. Change is good for college basketball, yes, but the simplest way to improve the sport for everybody is to take a step back to the old days and embrace what the women’s game has been doing and what the men’s game has lost sight of.