FAYETTEVILLE - Arkansas played its last of two men’s exhibition basketball games Tuesday night at Walton Arena.
The Razorbacks officially open their season against Southern Illinois-Edwardsville on Friday night in Fayetteville.
That’s too early.
It’s too early even with Razorbacks fans wishing for a diversion from this so far forlorn 3-6 football season that finds the Hogs wallowing winless at 0-5 in the SEC. It would be too early even if the Razorbacks were reliving their basketball glory of the 1990s under Nolan Richardson instead of a team that ended their season one-and-done in the SEC Tournament since 2009 without a NCAA Tournament or even an NIT postseason bid.
Early November just isn’t basketball time for a sport that increasingly puts nearly all its eggs in the March Madness basket.
College football roars at a November peak, soon to extend beyond mid-January with Division I post season playoffs kicking off for the first time after the 2014 season.
Time was that Dec. 1 was college basketball’s earliest opening date, with some occasional Nov. 30 exceptions if falling on a weekend.
Gradually the season-opening tip off dates encroached ever earlier in November.
Hard to believe now, but back in Eddie Sutton’s early Razorbacks era (1974-1975), there was talk, including from the former Arkansas coach, that tipping off Dec. 1 was too early.
Why not make basketball, the most academically challenging for those athletes seriously into academics because it is a two-semester sport, a one-semester sport?
Tip off with the holiday tournaments after most colleges’ fall semester final exams concluded and then run the season through an April apex, Sutton and other proponents said.
Obviously it fell on deaf ears.
Too bad.
Overexposing an increasingly meaningless college basketball regular season doesn’t seem to benefit one of the greatest of America’s games.
Conferences like the 14-team SEC are so unwieldy, particularly since the SEC abandoned splitting into East and West men’s basketball divisions, that pursuing a conference championship quickly yields merely to jockeying for NCAA Tournament position. Especially with the ensuing conference tournaments merely extending the jockeying.
College basketball’s plight as a sport dwarfed by football other than during March Madness seems embodied in what some recently feared would befall the University of Kansas when it appeared the Big 12 teetered on the verge of dissolving.
Starting with a Jayhawk, James Naismith, inventing basketball, the Kansas Jayhawks by far wield the most basketball tradition in the Big 12. Only Kentucky, North Carolina, Duke, Indiana and UCLA rival Kansas among collegiate basketball’s bastions.
But Kansas’ football program has been way more down than up.
Big-time conferences, and the TV dollars that fuel them, crave football.
So while Big 12 schools Nebraska, Colorado, Missouri and Texas A&M fled to other conferences, and Oklahoma and Texas were primed to be courted by those same power conferences, it was feared KU risked being left out in the minor conference cold had the Big 12 dissolved.
For a sport that basketball broadcaster Dick Vitale constantly espouses thrives on spacing, that’s another warning that spacing its schedule requires reevaluating.
Sports, Pages 14 on 11/06/2013