Kansas and North Carolina injected some life into college basketball’s summer news cycle on July 24 when they announced a home-and-home series to be played Nov. 8, 2024 at KU and Nov. 14, 2025 at UNC. The on-campus showdowns will be a massive early-season attraction in the sport and mark something unprecedented in the series.
These two grand brands — tied together by Dean Smith and Roy Williams — have previously played just one on-campus game against each other. That was in 1960 at Kansas. UNC has never hosted the Jayhawks in the series, which is tied 6-6 after KU bested the Tar Heels 72-69 in the 2022 national title game to even the series.
The home-and-home is rightly being labeled as “Battle of the Blue Bloods,” and perhaps it’ll inspire some other big brands around the country to get bold with scheduling on-campus games. For this week’s edition of the Dribble Handoff, our writers are taking a cue from the Kansas-North Carolina news and exploring which home-and-home series they would most like to see in college basketball.
I’m convinced even the people who run college athletics and are making these decisions will someday look back at conference realignment largely with regret. The money’s nice, sure. But willingly jumping to bigger and better leagues will always decrease the likelihood that you’ll win as much as you’ve previously won. And losing isn’t fun for anybody. Which is why I really do believe that fans of some schools — not all, but certainly some — will eventually bemoan their place in the world of college athletics and wonder why their favorite university threw geography in the trash just to have nicer practice facilities and stuff.
Simply put, these decisions come with a price. Rivalries are among the things sacrificed. And we’re possibly about to lose another one when UCLA officially leaves the Pac-12 for the Big Ten next year because that could represent the end of UCLA and…
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