Opening night?

You probably didn't know that college basketball season started tonight, but it did.

Seriously. Right now, on my television, UNC is playing Florida International. The Heels are wearing 1957 throwbacks with red waistbands. Jay Jason Williams is announcing.

While the start of college basketball season basically counts as a holiday in my apartment (cf. I'm watching UNC play FIU), the college basketball powers-that-be (and their television partners) appear not to care. Tonight's triple-header (UNC-FIU, Syracuse-Albany, Murray State-California) is on ESPNU, goes directly up against Monday Night Football, and its lead-in was "ESPNU Inside the Polls," a college football show featuring former Auburn football coach Tommy Tuberville and some guy named Tom Luginbill. (You should read the wikipedia link -- his credentials are slightly hilarious.) With a lead-in like that, you can tell that college basketball and ESPN are really pulling out all of the stops to make this a memorable season-opener. I'm also not 100 percent sure that this opening game was actually advertised on any of the ESPN networks besides ESPNU.

Anyway, Chronicle alum Seth Davis also thinks that this situation is ridiculous and unfortunate:

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.