Skip navigation
Favorites
Sign up to follow your favorites on all your devices.
Sign up

Kentucky, North Carolina, UCLA, Ohio State to partake in round robin event in Dec.

John Calipari, Roy Williams

AP Photo

AP

One of the biggest complaints when it comes to the college basketball regular season is that it just doesn’t matter enough.

The biggest games get overshadowed by football season and the holidays and no one really pays attention to what is happening in the sport until February, when the Super Bowl is over, conference season is in full swing and every conversation centers on seeding and the bubble.

In short, the concern is that the sport gets reduced to March Madness and, well, nothing else, and the result has been a push to get higher-profile games to be played earlier in the season, and it’s something that we’re seeing more and more of.

On Wednesday, CBS Sports announced another supremely intriguing early season event dubbed the CBS Sports Classic, built in the mold of the Champions Classic. Four teams -- Kentucky, UCLA, Ohio State and North Carolina -- will participate over the next three years in a round robin format. In 2014-2015, Kentucky will play UCLA and Ohio State will play UNC. That event will take place at the United Center in Chicago, with the locations -- the Barclays Center in New York in 2015-2016 and Las Vegas in 2016-2017 -- and the matchups rotating.

What makes this event interesting is that instead of it being held during the first week of the season, as the Champions Classic is, it will be played on the last weekend before Christmas; Dec. 20th of 2014. As college basketball teams get younger and younger, it has become quite obvious that the team we see in the first week and the first month of the season is rarely as good as that same team that takes the floor later in the year.

Regardless of when the event takes place, more good basketball games early in the season is never a bad thing to have happen, and you can rest assured that there will be quite a bit of hype leading up to these games.

Follow @robdauster