March is the best time of the year, April brings the chaos of the Final Four and player movement, and then it’s nothing. For months. And it’s sad. So, when does college basketball start again?
When Does College Basketball Start?
College basketball starts on Tuesday, Nov. 9.
The 2021-22 season will begin with the Champions Classic, as is customary, and this version will mark the event’s return to Madison Square Garden after the pandemic forced the 2020 games to be played at Duke and in Indianapolis.
Duke and Kentucky will meet as part of the doubleheader, the beginning of Coach K’s final season at the helm before retirement and an opportunity for both programs to put disappointing 2020-21 seasons behind them. Kansas and Michigan State will tip off against one another to round out the night, two teams that also have something to prove after how the previous campaign concluded.
Some other notable men’s college basketball games set for the start of the season are:
Loyola (MD) at North Carolina
Akron at Ohio State
Bucknell at North Carolina State
Oakland at West Virginia
Texas Southern at Oregon
Women’s college basketball will also start on Nov. 9. Many teams have not yet released a full schedule, so it’s still unclear who all will play on the sport’s opening night. We do know that Maryland will welcome Longwood to College Park at 11 a.m. EST that day, Texas State will take on Baylor in Waco, and in likely the biggest contest of the day, South Carolina will head to Raleigh to face North Carolina State. It’ll be a rematch of the game from December 2020 that the No. 8 Wolfpack won on the road, 54-46, to knock off the No. 1-ranked Gamecocks from their top perch.
It’s only uphill from the first day of the college basketball season. With preseason tournaments and marquee out-of-conference matchups spread throughout November and December, it’s enough to hold us over until the real fun comes in the conference slates. But we’ll have some meaty matchups to enjoy at the start of the 2021-22 college basketball season.
