Today is the first day of college basketball season

I always thought that the opening day of Major League Baseball should be a national holiday.

I didn't get my wish, but I didn't go to school anyway. Today is the official opening of the college basketball season, and I will bet that Seth Davis from CBS and The Messenger, and the author of The Soccer Prince, middle school book, sounds like a good stocking stuff for coming up in about a month and a half, I bet Seth Davis thinks that this should be a national holiday as well. The college basketball season is here.

How are you, sir? Well, I'm well, Adam, and actually you're going to see and hear a lot of kvetching from college basketball media, justifiably so, about sort of the lack of punch in these opening week matchups. You got Arizona Duke on Friday, but you talk about a national holiday, and this is one of many reasons why, basically I need to run everything, but especially college basketball, is I want college basketball to open up on Veterans Day every year, November 11th. It's right around the time the season starts anyway. Everybody starts on the same day, and you can tie in honoring our veterans and making it ceremonial, and it's usually a holiday where people aren't working, so we got to get that going, but you're right. Today is a special day for those of us, and I know there's a lot of folks in your area who love the sport. And maybe we can get better matchups, and I am not in any way throwing shade at Radford or Dartmouth or Northern Arizona, but we don't really have any good matchups tonight. We'll get good matchups, as you mentioned, Duke and Arizona coming up at the end of the week, but in college football, their first weekend at least features a bunch of really good games, and in college basketball, it is more like the soft open. I'm a big oceans movies fan, and soft open.

I remember when it was the Flamingo, it was closed, then it was open. Now we have a soft open, so I guess they can work all the kinks out, so let me ask you this. We'll take it. We'll take it.

Yeah. What is your top storyline going into the 23-24 season? Well, you know, I think we have a lot of the usual suspects at the top of the poll. So, you know, you've got Kansas, Duke, Michigan State, Purdue, Marquette.

That seems to be the consensus five. I think the Purdue storyline, Adam, is going to be interesting throughout the season. Obviously, it's already begun. Obviously, it began the moment that, well, first of all, when they lose to Fairleigh Dickinson in the first round of the tournament, but even more so when Zach Eady decided to come back. So now you've got not only the returning national player of the year, but you've got basically the same team that lost that game.

Yeah. And so, you know, on the one hand, they had an amazing season. There's a reason why they were a 1C that, you know, won the Big 10 regular season handily.

But there's the same team that not only lost to FDU, but has lost in the last three NCAA tournaments in the first round to smaller, quicker teams. And so Matt Painter is doubling, tripling, quadrupling. He just signed another 7-3 recruit coming in.

Everybody's going smaller, positionless, pace in space, and he's still trying to win with dinosaurs. So I'm going to be, I'm certainly rooting for him. I like the guy.

I think he's a fantastic coach. That's a heck of a fan base. They haven't made the Final Four since 1980, but much like Tony Bennett and his crew did after they lost their first round game, they're going to have to face the mental part of this every day, every game, you know, from the media or whoever about, you know, trying to make up for what happened.

And you can't do that until you get to March. And right now that's a long way away. Biggest difference between those two teams, I think from my perspective, is that Virginia had at least two NBA guys and had some other fringe NBA players. Zach Eady is probably an NBA player, but really only because he's gigantic.

He doesn't possess that. And I'm not knocking him as a player. He'll probably have a great college, I mean, he has already had a great college career.

He might be the college player of the year going forward. First of all, you mentioned Kansas. So they used to be the all-time winningest program, but they were docked 15 games. Did the NCAA just give up?

I mean, what? People got fired. People went to jail in the middle of this scandal and Kansas got docked 15 games. They got fined a little bit. This is, this is kind of amazing to me. Yeah.

We could spend a couple hours on this, Adam. I mean, basically the, the, the case that the Southern district of New York brought from the beginning was, was a farce. The whole thing was premised on a fraud. And so if you're going to charge somebody for it with fraud, you have to have a victim of the fraud. And they tried to make the argument that the victim of this supposed fraud was the schools because the schools were unknowingly committing NCA violations.

It would have to pay penalties. And therefore the school, uh, is the victim now only, uh, uh, an overreaching prosecutor could try to twist themselves to a pretzel. But the other thing that happened was, you know, the FBI, because they didn't know any better, frankly. Um, you know, they heard all these low level scam artists scamming each other. Hey, I got, you know, Patino, I got Larry and egg.

I got self, I got this, I got that. And they thought they were on the level when these guys were all full of it. So they figured, Hey, let's just move in on these guys, arrest them and they'll flip on the big names. And it turned out they were all BSing. So then the NCAA, instead of recognizing that, tried to follow it up. And they came up with this new process IARP, which no one really knew how it was going to go. And these were outside professional lawyers, investigated investigators who looked at this and said, this is all, this is all yes.

You know, and so all of these cases pretty much right on down the line, they either didn't, um, make the penalties stiffer or in Kansas's case, which almost never happened. They actually reduced the original allegations that the NCA put out. So I'm just glad it's all behind us because the whole thing was, was foolish from the beginning. And everybody said, Oh, these guys are all crooked. And the whole thing is coming down.

And I tried to make the point. These guys don't have the goods because head coaches aren't head coaches or stewards for agents. You know, that's where the, and by the way, all those rules that they supposedly broke right now, legal, they're all legal. Now there's no question.

Uh, all of the financial buying players stuff is 100% legal today. We could just say that Kansas is ahead of their time. Uh, Seth Davis is joining us here on the Adam Gold show. What is your forecast for ACC basketball this year? It's been two years in a row where the ACC has basically been a shell of itself. Of course, two years ago, two teams got to the final four. Uh, but I think tournament success is as much about, uh, luck of the draw, getting hot as anything else. I mean, we'd be foolish to think that the ACC is vintage, even though they've got three final four teams in the last two years.

Yeah. I mean, I think it's going to be very similar. I mean, I think one of the more interesting things that we're going to be watching, maybe not so much the season, but moving, I mean, you've got, you've got coaching turnover, right? So we've got Hubert Davis in year three, John Sarah year two and Adrian Autry in year one at Syracuse. So those are three pretty big time coaches who have been replaced, uh, in, in, in pretty rapid fashion. And Adrian Autry is already playing.

He's probably played more man-to-man possessions, uh, in their exhibition games and Jim behind played in the last 10 years, literally. So there's going to be a little bit of a turnover with that. Um, you know, I think Miami is going to be strong again.

They lost Isaiah Wong, but they brought, you know, pretty much everybody back and brought in the usual transfers down there and, and Lauren Aga, uh, God bless him still has his ass ball. Um, but you know, it's, it's still, you know, and, you know, Virginia is, is going to be in a, in a rebuild. Um, so I'm not seeing a ton of depth, uh, in the conference, frankly, I think you're still looking at Duke North Carolina and everybody else, Miami, I would say, um, but, uh, not a whole lot of depth. Now we'll see what happens when selection Sunday rolls around. They still have to fill out that bracket somehow with 68 teams, but, um, I don't even know what vintage, I don't even know who's in the ACC anymore. Quite frankly, everything like, Oh, there I know they don't come until next year.

I thought they were in, Oh, they left to go where it's like, I can't even keep track. I just kind of just watch the games and be like, Oh, that's right. This is an ACC game. I think I'll watch.

Yeah. Don't, don't write the ACC standings and Sharpie yet. Just don't, don't, don't do that. Set Davis. Don't, don't, don't abuse the Sharpie is joining us here on the Adam Gold show, by the way, you have, uh, you have rebounded from the Sharpie moment, uh, and have created like everybody just expect.

They, they just use it now. Sharpie the game is over and people just write Sharpie said Davis is joining us here. You alluded to, they have to fill out a 68 team bracket.

So we'll close on this. When do you think they will announce tournament expansion? And I know they can go basically to 90 because those are the rules as a, as they've said forth, but I don't think they're going to go to 90 right away. Do you think they'll go to 80?

What do you think they'll do? I'm far from convinced that they're going to expand the tournament. Adam, there is not the people drastically overstate the financial upside of, of expanding the tournament. So people say, well, they're just going after the money. Well, you know, even right now, if you take, say like a school like Kentucky, you know, true blue, but their NCAA, uh, tournament money makes up less than 5% of their athletic department budget.

Now think about that. Kentucky is only getting 5% of its entire athletic budget from all of its NCA tournament revenue. So if you're going to expand the tournament and maybe make a little more money off the tournament, by the time it goes through the NCA through all the, and the bet money goes to the conference first, and then it's split amongst all the teams in the sec, which now had like 45 teams. So if you're a Kentucky, what the, the, the tournament, so instead of 5% of your athletic budget, you're going to get 5.1% or 5.5%.

So there really isn't that much financial upside. Now there is frankly, a valid argument to be made for participation opportunity that, you know, division one has increased by great numbers and all these other sports have increased. Um, what it really comes down to is coaches trying to save their jobs.

And that's completely understandable. If you do not make the NCA tournament and certainly don't do it for multiple years, you are going to get fired. So the coaches are trying to say that way they can say like college football says, well, I went to a bowl game, say, well, who doesn't go to a bowl game?

Right. So, um, so I'm not convinced, you know, they've looked at it so many times and I don't know who's really out there pounding the table. Every time I talked to an athletic director, you know, even off the record, maybe a conference commissioner, someone at the NCA, I'm just not getting a big appetite. I'll end it with this, Adam, their true nightmare scenario is not expansion. The nightmare scenario is the power five leagues breaking off and doing their own tournament and basically saying, thank you NCA tournament. I don't even know if NC is going to be around after this house case, uh, is, is decided, but, um, you know, they could say, Hey, NCA thanks.

It's been a great 80 years or whatever it's been, but we got it from here. Um, that could happen. So I could see them saying like, let's say, you know, right now the, the, the opening rounds days are Tuesday and Wednesday. You got, you got, um, you know, two games each night. That's, uh, what, four teams each night, right?

You could add a pair of double headers during the day on those days. So you could add essentially eight more teams into the tournament. And if they could say to everybody, look, if we, if we do this, if we give this minimal expansion, you can see I'm revving my engine here as I'm making my argument. If we could make, if we, if we give you this, will you leave this tournament alone and just go ruin everything else? Like you're ruining everything else. Like, will you just leave the tournament alone? They might that I could see that happening for that reason, but there really is not a financial reason to do it. So I'm far, I'm far from convinced it could happen, but I'm not, I'm not seeing anything to indicate that there's a mass movement that something is imminent at Seth Davis hoops.

We close in fifth gear. I appreciate your time from the messenger and CBS. And of course the, uh, the book, the soccer Prince is a great gift for a young reader and we're six weeks away from giving gifts.

So why not, uh, go stuff that into stocking right now. I appreciate your time. My friend, Adam, your friendship is a gift. I appreciate your buddy. Wow. Oh, wow. What a way to close it out. Your friendship is a gift, right? I should be on a hallmark card. I like it. Cool for Seth Davis to give us a few minutes today.