It was tough to ignore a trend in college basketball last year as UNC’s neighbor from eight miles down the road was a big driver for it. It became even harder to ignore when Duke went so far as to schedule games next year that are outside of the ESPN contract and will be on Amazon Prime. The uniting factor–leaving the home arena and going to a neutral court that will pay more money to both schools. It’s an event that can be sold separately to television networks, and tickets for neutral court matchups tend to be higher than those at the home court.
Not to mention the arena is filled with people who paid to be there instead of a portion going to students that get in for free.
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That said in this age where programs need every single dollar, these high profile events are just going to grow. The ACC even encourages this with their paired back schedule of only 18 conference games. The idea was to use those extra dates to schedule more important non-conference games, not only to lift the schools’ profile but the conference as a whole.
It appears with the new head coach, Carolina is jumping on this train. On Thursday it was officially announced that Carolina will meet up with Illinois in Nashville on January 30th. The event is officially being called the Nashville Hoops Showdown, and brings together two college programs with huge fan bases that’ll effectively meet in the middle at the home of the Nashville Predators NHL team.
Illinois is coming off a return to the Final Four this season where they lost to defending national champion UConn, and the expectation is that they will be just as strong this upcoming season. As the Big Ten is consistently considered one of the strongest conferences year-in and year-out, this is exactly the type of event that the ACC was hoping for when they reduced the schedule. As of now there’s no TV or time listed for the game. It’s worth noting that date is the same as the NFL’s Divisional Round, where games usually occur around 4 PM and 8 PM, so it’s very likely going to be an earlier start.
As if that non-conference event wasn’t enough, earlier in the day Thursday Joe Giglio of “Ovies & Giglio” dropped a little bombshell while celebrating the fact that the Carolina Hurricanes will return to Greensboro for a preseason game.
Inside Carolina and Pack Power both later confirmed the schools were working toward this meeting. When it is finalized, it is objectively righting a wrong that the ACC committed in going back to the 18 game schedule. After only meeting once in Raleigh last season, the Tar Heels and Wolfpack appear to be set to be back to meeting twice in a basketball season.
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Traditionalists are going to argue this shouldn’t be necessary as it was twice-annual rivalry games like NC State vs Carolina that helped build the league into where it is, and that while the games may not have a huge amount of national interest–there is an insane amount of local interest. Of course when it was NC State’s vote that expanded the ACC to it’s current size, there are some that wouldn’t feel that much sympathy for having lost one of their biggest games of the season.
The non-conference matchup appears to be a way to satiate both of these, especially as with it being a neutral court event both schools can benefit financially between ticket sales and the event being sold to a broadcaster. The Tuesday night slot is after the college football regular season is done and the NFL is hitting the end part of their season, so it’ll be a good time to stage a special event.
Like the Nashville event, a time and channel isn’t known, but all of that info should be available soon.
