The Field of 68 is reviving college basketball’s opening-day 24-hour marathon, nearly a decade after ESPN discontinued the event;
ESPN launched the format in 2008, running 14 games across five time zones in its debut year and continuing the tradition for nine seasons before ending it in 2017. ESPN spokesperson Josh Krulewitz said at the time that the marathon presented programming challenges the network no longer wanted to manage, with resources instead shifting toward the newly created PK80 tournament.
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The Field of 68 ran three games at the Sanford Pentagon in Sioux Falls in 2024, then doubled that to six games across two sites in 2025, adding Rock Hill, South Carolina as a second location and moving to an 8 a.m. start. This year’s event expands again into a full round-the-clock schedule and secured an NCAA waiver to begin at midnight Eastern, with High Point facing Liberty as the opener in Rock Hill. High Point was the lone mid-major to advance past the first round of last year’s NCAA tournament, and the two teams combined for a 57-13 record last season.
The rest of the day unfolds in staggered windows across both sites. Grambling plays Northern Illinois at 3 a.m. in Rock Hill, followed by Appalachian State-Merrimack at 6 a.m. and Winthrop-Queens at 9 a.m. The broadcast shifts to Sioux Falls at 11:30 a.m. for Murray State-Tennessee State and again at 2 p.m. for UTEP-Northern Kentucky, before returning to Rock Hill for UAB-McNeese State at 5:30 p.m. and a Furman-Bethune Cookman nightcap at 8 p.m., which the Field of 68’s After Dark show follows.
The full schedule for Monday, Nov. 2 (all times Eastern):
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12:01 a.m.: High Point vs. Liberty (Rock Hill)
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3 a.m.: Grambling vs. Northern Illinois (Rock Hill)
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6 a.m.: Appalachian State vs. Merrimack (Rock Hill)
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9 a.m.: Winthrop vs. Queens (Rock Hill)
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11:30 a.m.: Murray State vs. Tennessee State (Sioux Falls)
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2 p.m.: UTEP vs. Northern Kentucky (Sioux Falls)
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5:30 p.m.: UAB vs. McNeese State (Rock Hill)
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8 p.m.: Furman vs. Bethune-Cookman (Rock Hill)
All eight games stream on the Field of 68’s YouTube channel and on X, with the broadcast crew split across both sites. Randolph Childress and Matt McCall will alternate analyst duties across the six Rock Hill games, with Jeff Goodman calling all six alongside them; Sam Ravech handles play-by-play for three of those six. In Sioux Falls, Rob Dauster and Terrence Oglesby serve as analysts, with Alex Heinert on play-by-play.
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“The schedule to open the college basketball season has been awful for years with the best teams in the country playing bottom-feeders, sometimes even non-D1 opponents,” said Jeff Goodman, co-founder of the Field of 68. “Fans wanted us to bring the 24-hour marathon back, and we wanted to create some of the best mid-major matchups in doing so.”
Eleven of the 16 teams involved in this year’s field won at least 20 games last season, five reached the NCAA tournament, and nine are projected to win their respective conferences this year. High Point, Murray State, McNeese, and Furman are considered among the four strongest mid-major programs in the country entering the season, with High Point standing alone in the field as the only team that won a tournament game last March.
It’ll be worth watching whether the Field of 68 can keep expanding this event year over year, as planned, now that it’s actually hit the full 24-hour format it was building toward.
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