Earlier this summer, the NCAA Division I Council approved an increase from 31 to 32 regular season games in college basketball beginning with the 2026-27 season.
Kentucky coach Mark Pope doesn’t think it’s nearly enough.
“I would love to get to 40,” Pope told CBS Sports on Thursday’s Eye on College Basketball podcast.
The second-year Kentucky coach has a variety of reasons why he thinks college basketball’s regular season should inflate by as many as eight games, which would also logistically require bumping up the start of the season to mid-October.
“One, our guys do better academically during the season than they do out of the season,” Pope said. “Two, when our guys go on to the NBA, they’ve played a 31-game season. This was my experience: When I got to the All-Star break my first year in the league, I felt like I’d played two seasons already and I still had 60 games left to play, so I’m not sure it’s a great prep for the NBA.”
Pope also cited college basketball’s especially high rate of replacement on rosters due to the portal as a reason to increase game inventory, in addition to the obvious carrot: more games is more money to pay players in this new era of revenue sharing.
“Our teams turn over so much — because of the current environment, which I’m all in for it, it’s all great — but to give our teams a chance to go through a couple evolutions in one season that they used to go through, they used to have one or two or three seasons to get through those evolutions of growth,” he said. “Now we’re trying to squeeze in one season, we could use some more games. And our fans get to know these kids more. Every single game last year, our fans, BBN, got to know our guys so much better. Our fans deserve it. And when you’re tying all this to revenue share, there’s nobody’s that’s going to complain — players, coaches, fans — about getting to 40 games where everyone capitalizes off the…
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