ESPN reportedly wants more January, February non-conference college hoops games

ESPN is preparing to air a monumental non-conference matchup between No. 1 Michigan and No. 3 Duke this weekend. And if that seems out of the ordinary, that’s the point.

In recent years, some teams have looked to schedule non-conference games in the middle of their conference schedules. The idea is that too much of the ratings metrics that dictate college basketball’s postseason are determined in November and December, when teams are playing non-conference games but haven’t had a chance to fully gel.

If, say, the Big 12 has an exceptionally strong year in the non-conference, practically all of the league’s games against each other become Quad 1 opportunities, creating a bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy. Similarly, if the ACC has a subpar non-conference record, there’s little its teams can do to prove they’ve gotten better since they’re only playing each other. It’s a system that reinforces results from a part of the season that is least indicative of a team’s true quality.

By allowing some cross-contamination later in the season, conferences can move the needle. It also creates exciting games for fans, as these non-conference matchups later in the season take on added importance not only for the teams playing but also for the leagues they represent.

And according to a report by Jon Wilner of The Mercury News on Thursday, ESPN is thinking about ways to create more of these late-season non-conference tilts.

ESPN senior vice president for college sports programming Nick Dawson appeared at a forum in December to discuss adding more of these games. “Is there more space in the calendar to organize non-conference opportunities in the middle of the conference season that, in a way, for me, allow a peak of interest in the sport, something different, something that might excite fans?” he posed.

There’s reason to believe conferences would be for this change. It allows leagues to recalibrate their metrics in relation to other conferences.

Wilner also notes that playing marquee non-conference games after the football season winds down makes a lot of sense from a viewership perspective. It could even be a vehicle to bring back a staple of ESPN’s college basketball programming circa the mid-2000s: BracketBusters, where teams were scheduled against each other based on current standings to help differentiate quality.

“As we think about it in terms of the future, especially from a scheduling perspective, (we) continue to try to identify ways to drive more and more interest and tentpole moments during the regular season,” Dawson said.

There are, of course, plenty of logistics to figure out before this type of scheduling becomes more frequent. Would these games be played at neutral sites, like this weekend’s Duke-Michigan matchup, or on-campus? How would conferences align their schedules with each other to create open dates for play? Could there even be an opportunity to move the SEC-ACC Challenge to January or February instead of December?

There are a lot of moving parts for something like this. But if conferences are on board for competitive reasons and television networks are sold on the viewership draw, it’d seem like only a matter of time before these types of games become commonplace.