Over the last three or four seasons, college basketball has gradually improved its’ opening-season slate with games on aircraft carriers and on military bases, as well as a handful of other one-off Made For TV spectacles. Those were a welcome change from the ignominious beginnings to seasons’ past, which mostly consisted of glorified scrimmages against bottom-tier opponents for a majority of high-level D1 teams.
On Monday, the Big East and Big Ten conferences jointly announced the “Gavitt Tipoff Games”, a season-tipoff event beginning in 2015-16 that will pair up teams from the two leagues. Another made-for-TV spectacle? Sure, you could say that, as Fox and ESPN will televise the entirety of the Games, but this is hardly a one-off event — the leagues inked an eight-year contract, ensuring this is an annual event from 2015 through 2022.
The Gavitt Tipoff Games will be a four-day, eight-game extravaganza of high-level college hoops during the first week of the season, featuring four home contests for each league. Two games will be played on Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday in the first full week of each season, with television rights controlled by Fox Sports 1 for games played in Big East arenas, and by ESPN or BTN for games played in Big Ten arenas. Each Big East team is guaranteed to participate a minimum of six times over the eight years, while Big Ten programs will participate a minimum of four times.
The two leagues are a natural partnership, as seven of the Big East schools share a state with a Big Ten school and several already play each other. All indications point to those rivalry games, such as Creighton-Nebraska and Marquette-Wisconsin, continuing outside of the Gavitt Games (freeing up those teams to play other opponents in the event), with Marquette’s Deputy Athletic Director Mike Broecker confirming on Twitter that the annual MU-UW game be in addition to the Golden Eagles’ game in this event. Adam Zagoria of SNY talked to Big East Commissioner Val Ackerman about that very topic, and about Creighton vs Nebraska specifically, she told him that unless the two schools agreed to move their game to early November from later in the month or in December, it would not be part of the Gavitt Games. She didn’t rule it out entirely, though, so we’ll have to wait for the first pairings to be announced in May of 2015 to know for sure.
In any event, it’s the geographic rival games that don’t already take place that seem to be getting the most press — Georgetown and Maryland are virtually neighbors, but have long refused to play one another; Ohio State/Xavier and Indiana/Butler are storied programs situated in close proximity but also do not play regularly; and DePaul and Northwestern share the same city but have let a once-annual series become just an occasional thing. All could be back in action, at least for one year, starting in 2015. Teams won’t be matched primarily on geography, however; much like the Big Ten/ACC Challenge, matchups will be set primarily based on the strength of the teams.
For the Big East, this is a huge step in solidifying the league’s image nationally. After a season where many in the national media (and in some cases, local media covering the teams) attempted to tarnish the league’s brand and find reasons to diminish the accomplishments of this cadre of football-less schools, the partnership shows that the Big Ten sees that nonsense for what it is — nonsense. Jim Delany is one of the shrewdest men in college sports, and by entering into a longterm contract with the Big East, he clearly believes it is still a top-tier league worthy of such a challenge.
Ackerman subtly hinted at the media’s attempts to bury the Big East in her remarks on Monday. “Our programs will have plenty to gain by testing ourselves against our counterparts in the Big Ten. We have helped return the Big East to Dave Gavitt’s original vision. Think of it as the sequel to the ‘Requiem.'” The jabs at ESPN for their ‘Requiem for the Big East’ documentary continued when Providence College’s President, Reverend Brian Shanley, took the podium. “It’s not the requiem, but the rebirth, of the Big East,” Shanley said, before agreeing that the latest incarnation of the league was a return to the roots of the Big East as envisioned by Gavitt.
For the Big Ten, this gives their teams an additional quality game and continues their quest to push into east coast markets. It would shock no one to see Georgetown and St. John’s play all eight years of the contract, and be a host team more times than not to give the series games in both NYC and DC, thus getting the Big Ten annual games in those two markets. They’ll continue the Big Ten/ACC Challenge, too, so that means the rich get richer — a league that has finished either number one or number two in the RPI each of the last four years will now ensure their teams play even more top-tier non-conference games.
The biggest winner in all of this, though, is FOX, unquestionably. This is a huge step in solidifying themselves as a destination for college basketball. With ESPN holding rights to virtually every holiday tournament, FS1’s November telecasts last year consisted of one-sided affairs like Creighton-UMKC, a game so devoid of drama it was interesting only to fans of those teams. The dismal first-month ratings were strong ammo for detractors, though a deeper dive showed that the numbers were deceiving. As the excellent Marquette blog Paint Touches wrote back in April, “The biggest factor…was the dearth of quality games. Of the 16 tilts broadcast on FS1, only four were between high-major teams. Unsurprisingly, those garnered the top three most viewed games, with Marquette at ASU coming in fifth. The rest were contests that would be lucky to have made ESPNNews, and would have been relegated to regional coverage 95% of the time.”
By January when Big East games commenced, FS1’s ratings climbed substantially. Again, from Paint Touches:
“FS1 more than tripled its average viewership from November 2013 to March 2014. If this was simply a college basketball thing (with interest really starting in March), you’d see the same trends for all the networks, but that isn’t the case. Percentage-wise FS1 was the only network to not see a decline at some point.”
How does Fox sustain that momentum in 2014 and get the season off to a better start? More games in November between high-major teams. The Gavitt Games gives FS1 four marquee games during the season’s first week, pitting teams from the highest-rated hoops league on TV, the Big Ten, with teams from a league it has a substantial monetary investment in, the Big East.
During a week when most teams from the ACC, SEC, Pac-12 and Big 12 will be beating up on lower-tier opponents, the Big Ten and Big East will basically have the spotlight to themselves as their teams battle it out in showcase games played not in docile neutral sites but in rowdy, hostile campus sites. Instead of waiting until Thanksgiving or even December for a marquee non-conference game, teams from those leagues will tipoff their season against a big-name opponent.
This looks like a (pun intended) slam dunk for all parties involved.