Proposition eyes change to D-I hoop start dates

• Myron Medcalf, ESPN Staff WriterJul 18, 2024, 06:44 PM ET

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  • Signed up with ESPN.com in 2011
  • Graduate of Minnesota State University, Mankato

A new proposal to start the females’s basketball season days earlier than the guys’s season might amplify the growing spotlight on the ladies’s game.The NCAA’s guys

‘s and women’s basketball oversight committees have proposed beginning the ladies’s basketball season on the Monday that falls 22 weeks before the women’s Final Four each season, 2 days before the start of the men’s season, starting with the 2025-26 project. With the females beginning their season on a Monday and the guys commencing their season on a Wednesday, the women’s game would “have actually increased marketing and advertising chances contributing to elevation of the sport at a school level,” per the NCAA’s release Wednesday.Editor’s Picks 2 Associated The change would also help both sports prevent conflicts with Election Day and provide more versatility for television windows and place demands.The start date and length of the practice season currently varies between 21 and 22 weeks for males’s and females’s basketball, both of which start their seasons each year on the same day.If the Department I Council authorizes the change in October, the first game

for women’s basketball might be played Nov. 3, 2025, and guys’s basketball might begin Nov. 5, 2025. Both sports are arranged to begin their seasons Nov. 11, 2025, under existing guidelines.The NCAA and ESPN just recently consented to an eight-year, $920 million extension on the media

rights deal for 40 championships, a package that includes the females’s Last 4 and championship game game. The growth of females’s basketball– which surged as Caitlin Clark, Angel Reese and others became celebrities in the last few years– is credited with playing a significant role in the huge increase(three times the previous deal)in profits the NCAA will receive. Of the$115 million per the year the NCAA will get under the new deal, $65 million of that total is attached to the ladies’s NCAA tournament, NCAA president Charlie Baker told Front Workplace Sports this year.