Good Morning, Illini Nation: Keeping college basketball relevant early in the season

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Welcome to “Good Morning, Illini Nation,” your daily dose of college basketball news from Illini beat writer and AP Top 25 voter Scott Richey. He’ll offer up insights every morning on Brad Underwood’s team and college basketball at large:

High profile nonconference games dot Big Ten schedules across the league. Illinois has notable showdowns with Alabama and Arkansas among four SEC opponents on the 2024-25 slate. Purdue will play three SEC teams. Michigan State has the Champions Classic against Kansas. And both Oregon and Rutgers will play in the Players Era Festival — a $2 million NIL-drive event in Las Vegas.

The Big Ten has lost, of course, both the Gavitt Tipoff Games after that contract ran out and the Big Ten/ACC Challenge once ESPN no longer had a media rights deal with the former. Exploring new partnerships in that vein is something Petitti said the Big Ten was exploring.

“I think there’s an appetite to do more things to drive interest in regular season college basketball,” Petitti continued. “If we can do things that create that interest early, that would be great. I think we’re open, in the Big Ten, to talking about all different kinds of formats whether it’s working with other conferences or doing things inside of our league.

“You’ve seen in-season tournaments in the NBA. There’s just ideas, and we should be creative about this and try to figure out how we generate more interest. There’s a lot of nonconference events that are staged by others. I think we believe that we can do more and more of that ourselves and find ways to bring our teams together with others and play meaningful games throughout the season.”

The first games of the college basketball season, of course, don’t happen in a vacuum. An early November start means going head-to-head with the NFL, NBA and college football.

“There’s opportunities during the week,” Petitti said. “There’s days when there’s no football being played. I think a lot of it’s the creativity of how you schedule and where you put these events to maximize interest and maximize attendance. I think there’s an opportunity there. Look, I think we’ve seen when you bring teams together and you create events that matter people find it. We do a lot of it now — I’m not suggesting that we don’t — but I think we can do a lot more of it.”