Big Ten tournament starting a week earlier has ripple effect on men's basketball schedules
ROSEMONT, Ill. – A week off between the Big Ten and NCAA basketball tournaments is nothing new for the league’s women’s coaches.
Michigan State’s Suzy Merchant chuckled Tuesday when asked if she is advising Tom Izzo about how to handle the men’s upcoming off-week in 2018.
“It’s kind of funny now that this is just so traumatizing to the men,” Merchant said. “I’m like, ‘Welcome to my world.’”
That compression of college basketball scheduling will hit the Big Ten men this year, and it has been a significant topic among both league athletic directors and basketball coaches in their meetings the past few weeks.
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To take the men’s conference tournament to New York in 2018, the Big Ten had to agree to move it up a week (Feb. 28-March 4) so it could fit around Madison Square Garden’s schedule. The Big East Tournament will be held there per tradition the following week. That leaves a one-week gap between the conference tournament championship game and the NCAA tournament selection show.
It’s a move that has concerned Izzo since it was announced three years ago. He and MSU administrators have talked with schools Gonzaga and St. Mary’s about how they have coped with that extra week between the West Coast Conference tourney and the NCAAs, athletic director Mark Hollis said.
“It’s, do you get rusty during that period of time? I think in college basketball, it’s always going to be when do you lose in the Big Ten tournament, how big is that gap?” Hollis said. “If you go until Sunday it’s probably not that big a deal. But you weigh all those things. I would not be an advocate for doing something in between.”
It also presents a wide-ranging ripple effect throughout teams’ schedules, starting at the front end.
The Spartans had to delay their scheduled series with Florida for a year due to the compacting of this year’s schedule, along with playing in the Phil Knight Invitational in Portland, Ore. MSU also will face Duke in the Champions Classic and take part in two annual cross-conference events, the Gavitt Tipoff Games against a Big East opponent and the ACC/Big Ten Challenge.
“It starts to limit what you can do,” Hollis said. “But I’m very much for it as an AD.”
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The Big Ten had only been held in Chicago and Indianapolis from 1999 until this year, when it moved to the Verizon Center in Washington. That push to the East Coast became a priority for commissioner Jim Delany when the conference added Maryland and Rutgers in 2014.
It also could mean conference play could begin much earlier than at the end of December as it has been in recent years, Delany admitted today.
“We’ll have more compression next year, there’s no doubt about it,” Delany said. “By that, I mean more games in shorter spaces because we moved the season up a week. … Next year is not going to be optimal, simply because we’re dealing with one fewer week in the schedule but the same number of games. Should we go to a larger number of conference games, that probably means fewer non-conference games and that means we sort of have to look at the sequencing of games and maybe the full use of the season.
“Typically, we’ve used November-December for the nonconference and then January and February for the conference. And I’ve wondered in my own mind, ‘What is the optimal way of presenting college basketball?’”
Two of the other big post-expansion topics among coaches and athletic directors recently has been protecting rivalries and potentially bumping the conference schedule up two games to 20.
Purdue athletic director Mike Bobinski said both MSU and Michigan want to play each other twice a year, especially after the two met only once in 2016 due to the league expanding to 14 teams and 18 conference games. Bobinski also said Indiana and Purdue, along with Illinois and Northwestern, want to assure they meet twice a year.
“Amongst the coaching group, there was unanimous support for protecting certain rivalries that have lots of interest both regionally and nationally, and probably for the good of the league and the good of our media partners,” Bobinski said, adding that those six schools “raised their hands and said, hey, we would love the opportunity to be in that group.”
“The rest of the coaches were like, ‘Hey, you know what, we don’t really have anything that we’re interested in, but we would support the concept of you guys having that happen.”
Delany said the league is not making that change yet, but both he and Bobinski said talks between coaches and administrators have been “constructive.”
“I think we’ll get to this,” Bobinski said. “I don’t know if we’ll be able to get to it for this year, but I think we’ll get there in the reasonably near future, which would be good.”
MSU ADDS GAME: A report from CBSSports.com said MSU will host Long Beach State for a game next season. The 49ers finished 15-19 overall and 9-7 in the Big West Conference in 2016-17.
Contact Chris Solari:csolari@freepress.com. Follow him on Twitter@chrissolari.