Running 2023-24 NCAA Basketball Thread

My God, even Fordham snickers at LaSalle’s gym.

 

Dean Smith used to schedule a road game near his seniors' hometowns.

 

Didn't know that. That's pretty cool.

 

The games stick out on the old schedules. They played at Bethune-Cookman for Vince Carter in Carter's third and final year if I remember correctly. Bill Guthridge was the head coach by then. Carl Torbush was the football coach. It saddens me that the coaches are all gone.

 

Before one-and-done, Coach K used to schedule games in players hometowns.

 

Does Sioux Falls have a random billionaire who loves college hoops and pays to bring in power teams from around the country for one-off games such as Auburn-Baylor?

 

So did coach K. Duke played at Canisius in Laettner's senior year, IIRC, and in Portland in Singler's senior year, even though Portland is five hours from Singler's hometown of Medford.

 

Yes. Look up Sanford and the Dakotas. That family has a huge stake in health care up there, Sanford Health. Pretty sure they're based out of Sioux Falls.

Thing of it is? They're not hosting these games at Sioux Falls' main arena, which is a modern facility that seats 8K and I think hosts the Summit tournament. It also carries the Sanford name.

They play at the Sanford Pentagon, which is a 3,250-seat mini-arena on the outskirts of town.

I went up to Sioux Falls on several football trips on a previous job, but on my last trip, I stayed at a hotel in the same development as the Pentagon. (Which might also be the same development where the Summit League is HQ'd. Sanford money wooed the conference office to Sioux Falls.) It's weird. You walk out of a Courtyard and there it is, basically, just random, but it's allegedly swanky inside.

Sanford money has largely bankrolled the rise of both North Dakota State and South Dakota State in football. Both probably do deserve to be FBS now with the facilities they have compared to when they entered D-I in the late 2000s.

 

Yep, she was just a ray of sunshine.

 

It was thanks to that tradition that I got to see my Tar Heels play in person for the first time. He brought the Heels to Indianapolis for Eric Montross and played at Butler in the fall of '92. That was in Barry Collier's early years of turning Butler around not long after the university seriously contemplated dropping out of DI and turning Hinkle into a rec center for undergrads. Or in other words, not the Butler teams of a decade or so later that might threaten to win that game. It was fun though.

Roy Williams kept the tradition going, although not quite as frequently in his era of star players only being there for a year or two and conference challenges dictating certain road games. The 2015-16 team played at Northern Iowa for Marcus Paige. The 2006-07 team played at St. Louis for Tyler Hansbrough.

The 2012-13 team played at Long Beach State but that wasn't for a player, it was a pit stop on their way to Hawaii. Same with the 2008 game at UC Santa Barbara mentioned above. They also played road games at his former assistants' schools - so they did UAB for Jerrod Haase in his first year and UNCW for C.B. McGrath - and they've helped open new arenas for Elon and UNC Asheville. They also played at Tulane during Mike Dunleavy's first year there, but I don't really know what the connection was, if there was one.

I always appreciated Roy's willingness to do mid-major and low-major road games, even if they were usually for a specific purpose that might be one off for that particular school.

 

Mulkey seems like one of those people who are only happy when they are miserable, and miserable when they are happy. Nice outfit tho!