Thousands entered Boise State’s arena on Monday night for the first day of the college basketball season. They arrived, I must assume, with high hopes. The Broncos are generally pretty good. They’ve won at least 19 games a year since the 2019-2020 season, and went 26-11 last year. Three starters are gone from last season’s team, but transfer point guard Dylan Andrews is a good bounce-back candidate after a disappointing junior year at UCLA; even last year he was a solid passer. The Broncos were picked third in the Mountain West and slotted in the 50s in preseason computer ratings. These things change, but there was no reason to suspect that Monday’s contest against Division II Hawaii Pacific was anything but a classic early schedule gimme game.
Andrews had 15 points and 9 assists in 33 minutes, all team highs. That is the full extent of the good news. Hawaii Pacific led for most of the game and held on at the end, 79-78; the 10,795 ticketed fans in attendance did not leave happy. It was an upset that the Idaho Statesman called “one of the worst losses in program history.” It “can only be described as the worst loss in program history,” 24/7 Sports intoned. “One of the largest upsets in College Basketball History,” a college hoops sicko tweeted, adding “this is not an understatement.” Yeah, obviously.
“I’m so happy they get a core memory for life,” Hawaii Pacific coach Jesse Nakanishi said. “Some stuff we talk about is creating memories, and that’s surely going to be one that no one can take away from them.” A trip to the Treasure Valley might be a core memory anyway, but outplaying a potential NCAA tournament team should etch it more deeply into those players’ brains. Joshua West’s 23 points led all scorers; he was one of four Hawaii Pacific players to finish with double figures.
The Broncos would like to forget this one. “I feel like we just underestimated the team, and they wanted it more than us,” Andrews said. I especially liked how depressed the Statesman made the game’s final play sound: “Andrews lingered beyond the three-point line before sending off a shot with less than five seconds left on the clock. As quickly as the anticipation of a last-second winner mounted, it just as promptly drained away as Andrews’ shot bounced off the rim and away. [Spencer] Ahrens’ desperate put-back at the buzzer fell short, and an eerie silence fell over ExtraMile Arena as fans immediately flooded for the exits.”
Boise State’s game against the Sharks, who went 15-14 last season, was one of a multitude of exhibition-esque games on college basketball’s first day. For every proper major-program matchup—and there were a handful, led by an impressive Arizona win over third-ranked Florida in Las Vegas—there were a bunch of games in which a D-I team took on a program from a lower division. The Prairie View A&M Panthers beat the College of Biblical Studies Ambassadors 95-48. The VMI Keydets topped the team from Johnson & Wales University's Charlotte campus, the Wildcats 122-58. In Monday’s best-named matchup, the Florida International Panthers beat the Florida National Conquistadors 101-49.
The Division I teams almost always wallop these schools, even when seemingly going out of their way to avoid embarrassing their opponents. The Kennesaw State Owls beat the Paine College Lions 105-30 on Monday; per the box score the Owls had just four fast break points. Other games are closer. The Kansas City Roos trailed for much of the game before beating the Evangel Valor 80-74. I’ve included the nicknames here so you can learn them, even if they’re of a D-I school. UMKC changed from Kangaroos in 2019, but this is the first I’m hearing of it. It’s possible I forgot. Also Johnson & Wales’s Providence campus teams are also the Wildcats. Those Wildcats play the D-I Bryant Bulldogs and Central Connecticut State Blue Devils later this month.
These sorts of tune-up games are a rising trend in college basketball, as I wrote back in 2022; the occasion, then, was the Portland Bible Arrows trailing the Portland State Vikings 38-0 before losing 114-31. Per Kenpom, there were almost 300 D-I games against lower-division and non-NCAA games in the 2002-03 season; there were nearly 500 in 2022-23.
It makes sense for a big school to schedule these games, even beyond banking an easy win in the standings. Crucially, the game itself does not count as part of the NET, the rankings the NCAA uses as part of its selection process for the tournament. Play a lowly team from a lowly Division I conference, on the other hand, and it will hurt your strength of schedule. Play the Mary Baldwin Fighting Squirrels, for instance, as the Longwood Lancers did yesterday, and your 92-55 win is basically an exhibition game that fans pay to attend. The box score says 2,341 fans saw the Squirrels get lanced, while Boise State got a small city’s worth of people out to its game yesterday. (These games are almost always counted as exhibitions for the lower-division team, too, which means they don’t have a 75-point loss in its season totals.)
Of course, if you lose one of these games you will still be a laughingstock, as sports talk radio host Doug Gottlieb’s Green Bay Phoenix were last year when they lost to the Michigan Tech Huskies, and as Boise State is today. And while the NET ratings don’t see the game, the people who pick and seed tournament teams are people, and they do. If the Broncos are on the bubble, they had better hope their first game of the year was not a core memory for selection committee members.
