Hoops is back ... with a whimper

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Even with Deon Thompson and North Carolina kicking off the college hoops season Monday, Opening Day is largely under the radar. AP

So did you know Monday is Opening Day in college basketball?

Okay, you probably did, because you are a bona fide hoophead. But what about the guy in the cubicle next to you, the one who right now is secretly checking on his NFL fantasy team? Or what about the fella who sat across from you on the subway this morning reading the paper as it was meant to be read, sports, and then everything else? And your brother-in-law, who likes basketball but mostly follows the NBA? Does he know today is the big day?

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Chances are, they don't. That's largely because college basketball has the unfortunate task of beginning its season at a time when the World Series has just ended and all the other major sports are well underway. But the obscurity exists also because the people who have the most influence over the sport have neglected to devise an Opening Day that breaks through all the clutter. It's a sad commentary that the start of practice, Midnight Madness, attracts so much more attention than the commencement of actual games.

The idea to create an Opening Day was supposed to be part of the mission undertaken by the College Basketball Partnership that was created in 2004 at the behest of Myles Brand, the late NCAA president. The group brought together about two dozen people who respresented the various stakeholders of the game: coaches (Mike Krzyzewski, Jim Boeheim and Tom Izzo), conference commissioners, athletic directors, media executives and TV commentators like Billy Packer and Clark Kellogg. When Brand announced the formation of the group, he did not promise how long it would exist or how often it would meet. He simply said he wanted to create a forum that would serve as an incubator of ideas, and that those ideas would soon grow into real initiatives.

The group undertook a flurry of activity in its first two years, but it soon petered out and hasn't met since 2006. Some of the early ideas have come to pass, most notably the academic reforms that Brand made the heart of his tenure. The CBP also birthed the joint initiative between the NCAA and NBA, recently re-branded iHoops, to address the ills that plague grassroots basketball. The Opening Day idea, which has been heavily promoted over the years by former Big East commissioner Dave Gavitt, was on the group's short list as well, but the panel's plate got very full very quickly. As a result, Opening Day fell by the wayside.

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Greg Shaheen, the NCAA's senior vice president for basketball and business strategies, agrees that this idea is long overdue, but he also concedes it won't be easy to get all the moving parts into place. "It's a little bit like herding cats," he says. The NCAA may want to start by looking at the rule stating that teams cannot begin playing regular season games before the second Friday of November. (Tonight's four contests, which are part of the 2K Sports benefiting Coaches Versus Cancer, are exempted because they resulted from contracts that were signed before January 8, 2006.) If there are not enough teams that are willing to play games at that early date, the NCAA may want to look at pushing it back a week -- which might be a good idea anyway, since so many people (including me) believe the season starts too early.

Even if the NCAA could create an Opening Day, it would have to decide the best way to execute it. They could adopt the NFL and college football tactics of beginning with a Big Bang, where two of the most prominent programs face off in the only game of the night. Or, they could take the more scattershot baseball-style approach in which hundreds of games are played on the same evening.

Then there's the question of deciding what day this should all take place. With the weekends being consumed by college and pro football, it seems the most logical time would be Friday night, when the only competition would come from high school football. In the end, however, it doesn't matter what day or night is chosen and who plays so long as the NCAA and its media partners pursue the notion with gusto.

Unfortunately, there doesn't seem to be anybody of influence really concentrating on making this happen at the moment, but Shaheen hopes it will become a priority. "I don't know that there's a lot of momentum, but there's a consensus that we need to explore the best ways to try and unify around an opening day or opening weekend in a way that paints a clearer picture for college basketball," he said. "There's no easy answer, but it's definitely something we have to take on."

Let's hope they do. I'm as excited as anyone that the new season is finally getting underway. I just wish it started with a bang instead of a whimper.