Basketball haters of the world, be warned. Your life will get even more challenged at approximately 10:30 AM Eastern time this morning.
When Georgia Tech’s women’s basketball team tips off their 2024-25 season at Atlanta’s McCamish Pavilion against their arch-rivals from Winthrop on ACC Extra (yes, that exists), it will be the first of 340 different college basketball games involving Division I teams of both genders that are on track to be contested today.
A half-hour later after the Eagles and Yellow Jackets get it started the men join in, with the in-system rival campuses of Indiana University from Columbus (not Ohio) and Indianapolis square off. The latter, incidentally, shares branding with fellow state Big Ten school Purdue University and is known as IUPUI, which at first blush looks like a punchline for a grade school joke about a kid with incontinence issues).
And for the ensuing thirteen hours, games all over the country–and a couple outside of it–will tip off, with virtually all of them available on some linear or streaming platform. Welcome to the world of infinite choices, and on a day like this, thanks to the generosity of larger schools allowing nearby schools from smaller divisions and NAIA to get a tad more attention than they normally do that promise is kept–and then some.
The ESPN.com staff dropped a teaser article for today late last week–with this much content, it clearly takes more than a few to handle the job:
The action tips off Monday with a host of enticing matchups, including a star-studded women’s doubleheader across the pond in Paris in the Aflac Oui-Play Event. No. 3 USC, led by returning star JuJu Watkins, is set to face off against No. 20 Ole Miss on ESPN, followed by No. 17 Louisville vs. No. 5 UCLA on ESPN2. On the men’s side, No. 8 Baylor and No. 6 Gonzaga clash in a top-10 showdown on ESPN2.
I consider myself to be a rather passionate college sports fan and since I’m an alumnus of a Division II/III school I pride myself on knowing some rather obscure institutions of higher learning. But I’ll confess even I hadn’t heard of some of the colleges that will be serving as appetizers today for what ESPN.com taunts will eventually be more than 7400 games over the next six months on their platforms alone.
Here’s just a few that I needed to educate myself on:
MEN: LaGrange (at Jacksonville State)–The oldest private college in Georgia; founded as a women’s-only school in 1831.
Old Westbury (At Hofstra)–One of the newer SUNY schools, founded in 1965, a few exits up the Meadowbrook Parkway from the school that sits in the shadow of the Nassau Coliseum (and no, not a member of the conference that includes its sister campuses).
Georgian Court University (At Drexel)–A private Roman Catholic university located in Lakewood Township, New Jersey, which is home to one of the state’s largest Orthodox Jewish populations.
WOMEN:
Meredith College (At Charleston)–A women’s-only school founded in 1891 that’s a few miles from the North Carolina State University campus in Raleigh.
Lincoln University (At Longwood)–An HBCU founded as the private Ashmun Institute located in Oxford, Pennsylvania.
Park University Gilbert (At Northern Arizona)–An NAIA school located in Gilbert, AZ. It just happens to be in Maricopa County, and perhaps you’ve heard they’ve got other events preoccupying them this week.
And per YAHOO! Sports’ Danica Creahan, there’s at least ten other destinations that will have regular schedules of Division I games. You’ll have to get that much creative to track down the outlets that will be carrying the full schedules of some of the visiting schools listed above.
No one could possibly watch that much basketball–not even a professional or compulsive gambler. You’ll be relieved to know that none of the games listed above have established lines on any mainstream site, even ESPN BET.
But someone somewhere will be watching–or at least multi-tasking with– at least one of today’s 340 contests.
And I’ll confess–I might just be paying attention to a couple. Especially the one involving Old Westbury. Old habits die hard.
Courage…