NCAA sets tentative start date for the 2020 college basketball season

If you are a college basketball lover, this just might be the news you’ve been waiting for since March.

The NCAA has scheduled a date for the start of the 2020-21 season of college basketball, with on-court action expected to start November 25, per multiple reports.

The season will start on that Wednesday, so while your jobs and week seems like it’s going slowly, flip on the TV, drop those thoughts, and fully invest in some college basketball.

While the start date is November 25, practices are slated to begin on October 14, with strength-and-conditioning work allowed starting Sept. 21. Overall, the stat of the season was pushed back 15 days, with an original start date of Nov. 10.

Schedule-wise, nothing is completely set in stone yet, with conference officials now tasked with deciding what a season could look like. At this point, the biggest question is how to deal with travel, especially for conference games. Will it be in a neutral-site bubble? Will there be restrictions on who teams can schedule due to travel? What could result in a cancellation?

Conferences can also ultimately decide to push back the season to a different start date based on a number of factors, given the Nov. 25 date is a guideline. However, they cannot push it forward, as the NCAA council declared no exhibition or scrimmages could be held before that date, and that waivers would be very likely to not be granted for non-conference games before that date.

There are still a few questions to which there are no answers to at this time, but with student-athletes already conducting workouts on campus without a schedule, and a start date established, the dominos should start to fall relatively soon.

The NCAA has set minimum and maximum standards for a sanctioned schedule, with the least amount of games acceptable being 13, and 24-25 games being the cap in men’s basketball, while women’s basketball has a maximum of 23-25.

Of those games, the NCAA also recommended schools to schedule four non-conference games slated.

The bottom line of this, shows that the NCAA has given a full and extreme effort of having a college basketball season, and as of right now, the framework seems to be in place to accomplish that.