Here’s an interesting way to improve college basketball’s early season

Let’s face it, other than the midnight madness and a few top ten matchups, the early part of the college basketball season is pretty boring. It usually consists of big name teams playing mid-major schools that they should be beating by 15-20 points a night.

One way to ramp up some of the early season invitational tournaments would be to make one very meaningful to the NCAA Tournament. On a recent episode of Matt Painter’s College Basketball Madness Podcast, USA TODAY Sports’ Dan Wolken and Nicole Auerbach proposed a pretty interesting idea.

The two talked about how there should be a 16-team tournament featuring the previous year’s Sweet Sixteen teams. The winner of the tournament would get an automatic bid into the NCAA Tournament the following March.

The two proposed that tournament would push the start of the season back to the weekend of the Army-Navy game as opposed to mid-November, where many big college football games are taking place. The tournament would take place in prominent basketball arenas, such as the Palestra in Philadelphia and the Pit in Albuquerque, and cities that have hosted NCAA Tournament games in the past, such as Dayton, Ohio and Kansas City, Missouri.

This would certainly be an interesting way to determine at least one of the team’s in the tournament at the end of the year. Usually, the Sweet Sixteen teams are competing for a spot in the tournament the next year, but not all of them actually make it back the next year.

Looking at some of the teams that made the Sweet Sixteen last year, this may work out to be pretty interesting. All of last year’s teams to make that portion of the tournament should be back in it this year, but there are times where they don’t have a terrific season the year before.

You can listen to the entire podcast below.

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What do you think, college basketball fans? Would this be a good idea or should we just leave it the way things are now?

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*Featured Photo (above) credit to USA TODAY Sports

Video: Oregon State’s Gary Payton posterizes defender once again
Video: Oregon State’s Gary Payton posterizes defender once again