NCAA basketball season sets 2020-21 start date of Nov. 25

The college basketball season is set to begin just a couple weeks later than originally planned.

The first day of competition for men’s and women’s basketball will be Nov. 25, the NCAA Division I Council announced Wednesday evening.

It’s a delay of just more than two weeks from the originally scheduled Nov. 10 start date as collegiate athletics continues to grapple with the COVID-19 pandemic. Many schools have changed their academic calendars to end the fall semester that week, which would leave campuses less populated and allow for something closer to the “bubble” environment that has allowed the NBA and WNBA playoffs to continue unabated.

“The new season start date near the Thanksgiving holiday provides the optimal opportunity to successfully launch the basketball season,” NCAA senior vice president of basketball Dan Gavitt said in a statement. “It is a grand compromise of sorts and a unified approach that focuses on the health and safety of student-athletes competing towards the 2021 Division I basketball championships.”

The new date will preserve a number of scheduled multi-team events played at neutral sites that are popular in that holiday week. Some high-profile multi-team events, such as the Maui Invitational, are scheduled to begin ahead of the Nov. 25 start date, putting their status in limbo.

The date is earlier than many had speculated as a possibility throughout the summer, when a January opening was widely discussed. Still, schools will now scramble to adjust their schedules to account for the later start as well as whatever alterations each conference makes to its own schedule in response to the pandemic, which to date has resulted in the deaths of more than 190,000 Americans.

There is tremendous pressure to create an architecture for a season that will allow for an NCAA Tournament after the onset of the pandemic forced the cancellation of the 2020 edition of March Madness. Football programs fund most large athletic departments, but the money from the men’s basketball tournament is the main source of revenue for the NCAA, which hosts the championships for every sport other than FBS football. A second skipped tournament would be financially catastrophic.

What shape the 2021 NCAA Tournament might take remains to be seen.

Coaches from the ACC, which includes some of the sport’s most influential figures such as Duke’s Mike Krzyzewski, North Carolina’s Roy Williams and Syracuse’s Jim Boeheim, have proposed universal inclusion in the tournament.

The concept, though, was met with a cold shoulder from the NCAA.

“While all who care about the game are entitled to their opinion, and we'll always listen respectfully, at this time we are not working on any contingency plan that involves expanding the tournament field,” Gavitt said last week of the 68-team event.

The council has recommended schools play at least four nonconference games.

Any potential change to the NCAA Tournament field may be contingent on what paths individual conferences take. Wednesday’s announcement provides a framework for the season, but conferences will decide how they want to operate within it.

If high-major leagues opt to play only conference games, it will complicate the metrics the NCAA selection committee uses to form its bracket. It would also eliminate a significant revenue source for mid- and low-major programs, who rely on the “buy-game” money they receive for playing road games at bigger schools. 

The Big 12 and ACC allowed for one nonconference game in football, while the Big Ten and SEC have conference-only schedules. The Pac-12 does not currently plan to play football this fall, and previously announced it would not play any sports — basketball included — until at least January 2021.

Certainly, any decisions are subject to revision given the fluctuating circumstances inherent to a pandemic. The NCAA’s announcement comes the same day the Big Ten decided to start its football season in October with enhanced coronavirus testing, reversing the decision it made just last month that the league wouldn’t play football until the spring of 2021.

The council is set to meet again in mid-October.

In addition to the start date, the NCAA council voted to halt recruiting visits through the calendar year, ban interprogram scrimmages and exhibitions and allow for 12-hour practice weeks for teams starting Sept. 21. Teams can begin practicing in full on Oct. 14  The maximum number of allowed games has been decreased from 31 to 27, while the minimum number of games will be 13.

The Division I council also barred competition or practice on the first Tuesday after Nov. 1 — Election Day — in an effort to increase civic engagement among athletes.

“We look forward to seeing student-athletes use this opportunity as a way to create positive change,” said council chair M. Grace Calhoun, athletics director at Pennsylvania.