42 game season for NCAA Basketball? Now possible.

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Part of being a basketball sicko is enjoying reading the rulebooks and bylaws from start to finish. When I worked at ESPN, my coworkers used to poke fun at how quickly I could find weaknesses in things like our college QBR draft¹, as if I was always trying to cheat the game.

If we are agreeing to play within a set of rules, I want to understand everything those rules allow. And with college basketball changing this quickly, some of the Really Good Ideas I have been sitting on might become obsolete before anyone tries them.

Here is one: college basketball teams taking foreign tours over winter break.

For Division I, the timing rule permits published vacation periods, generally including the travel. Its preseason blackout does not rule out December and the NCAA approved annual foreign tours in April 2026, removing the once-every-four-years restriction. Programs now have a much more immediate reason to think about how to use that opportunity.

Most coaches reading this are probably asking why the hell they would add a foreign tour in the middle of the season. I think there are several good answers.

You can create more games and more opportunities to generate revenue. Basketball teams can play up to ten games on a qualifying foreign tour. Those games are excluded from the regular-season contest maximum.

Ten additional games means as many as ten additional events to sell: tickets, streaming coverage, sponsorships, or packages built around fans traveling with the team. I would be interested in seeing a school price out a short December series with a destination or international club partner. The school’s brand brings an audience, the host supplies a venue and local interest, and the players get additional competition.

Of course, ten games is the ceiling. A two or three game trip might make considerably more sense. Those are questions for the business plan, which is precisely why I would like to see someone build one, and I would happily advise any coaches who want help doing that⁵.

Build the tour around the players who need the minutes. This is the version of the idea I find most approachable: a B team of sorts, built from the program’s eligible reserves and developmental players.

There is value in practice, but there is also value in playing against someone who does not already know your sets. Players get more meaningful run and more film. Coaches get evidence about players they may need later in the season.

By December, the staff also has a better idea of what needs work. It can choose opponents and allocate minutes around specific developmental goals. I would build the itinerary around those goals rather than feel obligated to reach ten games².

The new eligibility model makes the development argument more interesting. For players certified under the NCAA’s new age-based model, seasons of competition and athletics redshirts are no longer tracked. Their eligibility runs within a continuous five-year period. Playing on a December tour therefore does not burn a separate season under that model. Sitting out does not preserve the running eligibility period⁶.

Practice and travel are separate questions. A player eligible to practice may qualify for tour practice and travel expenses without being cleared to compete. That could still make the trip valuable to a developing player, even without game appearances, or one who is currently fighting in court to gain eligibility.

The incoming-player foreign-tour exception expressly addresses summer tours. December participation also requires examining the academic-year tour rule and any applicable pre-enrollment or between-term exceptions. A player accepted for January enrollment may have a different path from a recruit who has not satisfied competition-eligibility requirements.

Smaller programs can use this to recruit and develop players earlier. Duke recruited Joaquim Boumtje Boumtje to come a year early. Texas did the same with Marcus Spears Jr. Those programs can make the early-entry pitch to players everyone already knows are stars, and part of that is knowing they will be in the rotation on day 1 as a 17 year old.

If you coach at a mid-major or another lower-budget Division I school, I think there is a version of that strategy for you, too.

Imagine a 17 year old who can graduate early and qualify for college. You think he could become an excellent player, but he needs strength, experience, and more time learning to play his position. Another prep season might also be the season that gets him noticed by a school with a much larger recruiting budget³.

You could offer him a concrete reason to join your program now: college coaching, strength training, academic support, and a defined developmental role. A December foreign tour could give that first term a competitive purpose, with substantial minutes against opponents chosen to challenge him appropriately.

That is a much more useful pitch than asking him to arrive early and spend the year watching. You could sign him and begin developing him before another year of prep or club basketball turns him into a national recruit. The player and his family would be choosing a program that has already invested thought in his development and has actual games planned for him.

For a young prospect whose birthday puts NBA eligibility two draft cycles away, that additional runway could be particularly useful. Entering at 17 does not automatically mean two college seasons: the NBA uses age during the draft calendar year, along with its other eligibility requirements.

You can play teams containing prospective college athletes. This is another part of the rulebook that makes the idea interesting. Bylaw 13.11.1.3 allows permissible foreign-tour competition against outside teams that include PSAs (prospective student athletes).

That opens up potential matchups with qualifying foreign club or select teams containing players who may eventually play college basketball. Imagine giving your reserves substantial minutes against an international development team whose players are also trying to prove they belong at the next level. That could produce a much more interesting game than the phrase “foreign-tour exhibition” suggests.

For men’s basketball, the ordinary restriction also excludes other American teams, with a specified exception for U.S. military teams stationed abroad. Women’s basketball already has an exception allowing one game against another Division I institution. It seems like the NCAA is on track to allow “domestic tours” in the summer and allow competition against US four-year college teams, which could be its own topic, but might open up the acceptable opponents for winter break foreign tours.

Foreign professional clubs are another potential opponent category. There could be value in developing those relationships, including with clubs whose former players attend your school. Any proposed payment linked to securing a player’s release would need separate compliance analysis; the tour rule alone does not authorize that arrangement.

And yes, the Toronto Raptors make for an interesting hypothetical. On the NBA side, the current collective bargaining agreement allows up to three exhibitions during the regular season, subject to scheduling restrictions. The NBA’s published bylaws also require majority approval from the Board of Governors for an in-season exhibition⁴. I would want the NCAA’s interpretation of the Raptors as an opponent before treating that matchup as available, but the NBA’s regular season does not itself make the concept impossible.

You can even do this on U.S. soil. The foreign-tour rules expressly allow qualifying tours to Puerto Rico or the U.S. Virgin Islands, and as cited above is soon going to allow them in the 50 states.

That gives a school another set of destinations to consider when comparing travel, venues, opponents, and potential audiences. A program could explore a winter-break series there (and sell its fans on a vacation package just like Thanksgiving MTEs) with qualifying international teams and a rotation designed around its developing players.

A national brand could turn this into a major media event. The commercial opportunity gets much bigger if a program builds a tour around its stars and its national audience.

Duke has already announced a multiyear agreement with Prime Video for three neutral-site regular-season games per year. This is a signal from them that they are looking to maximize how much money they generate, primarily to support their recruiting efforts⁷. That gives us an example of a broadcaster packaging premium games around the appeal of a particular college program.

I would like to see Duke test whether a qualifying winter foreign tour could become an additional multimillion-dollar annual series. This is actually something I pitched to them in February.

Imagine Duke playing Serbia’s Mega in Toronto, or staging a series in Puerto Rico against international clubs with their own future NBA players. A future NBA Europe club could be another compelling opponent if that league and its teams materialize and the matchup meets the applicable rules.

You would have recognizable college stars, international prospects, different styles of play, and a comparison that basketball fans already argue about: how does the best young talent in college match up against the best young talent developing overseas?

Sell the series as a package. Negotiate the media rights, title sponsorship, destination partnership, tickets, hospitality, and fan travel packages together. A broadcaster could get several connected events, with enough time between games to build interest in the players and the next matchup.

For this version, I would want headline games featuring the school’s stars. Coaches could use other games on the itinerary for developmental minutes. The audience promise and the basketball plan should agree with each other.

I would not assume that ten games would sell for ten times the price of one. Obviously there will be diminishing returns. Each matchup would need an audience and a reason to watch. But a national brand with up to ten exempt tour games available has a serious opportunity to put in front of broadcasters and sponsors. I would want competitive bids before deciding how much of that opportunity to use.

Let’s walk through an example.

Ohio State is on the semester system, and at the latest (it depends on each student) their winter break starts on December 18th, and spring classes start January 11th. That is a 24-day break. Does 10 games now seem not so crazy? They are currently slated to play 6 games during that window, with 4 of those being conference games, one being a part of the CBS classic, and one buy game during the week of Christmas.

In November and January, OSU plays roughly 2 games a week, so to redistribute those games they would have to go to play 3 games a week. You don’t have to go on a 24-day break, and you don’t have to go from 2 games a week to 3. You just have to find the sweet spot that logistically works for you⁸.

So either before or after Christmas, there is adequate time to set up shop somewhere in the Caribbean, play 3-4 games, and sell a nice tourism package to one of the largest fanbases in the world.

The real question is whether December is the best use of the opportunity. There are obvious costs: travel, fatigue, injury exposure, staff time, and the difficulty of finding a useful window between scheduled games. A reserve-heavy roster also changes what fans and commercial partners might be willing to pay.

Meanwhile, the NCAA’s October proposal would create limited domestic summer competition against four-year colleges, with a potential April 2027 effective date. That remains a proposal about summer opportunities, not an adopted permission to play other U.S. colleges on a December foreign tour.

I would like to see a program take the December idea seriously enough to identify the players, opponents, dates, and commercial partners that would make it work. Give the players who need minutes a useful schedule. Give the coaching staff a clear development plan. Then see whether the audience and economics support it. College basketball spends a lot of time talking about player development. Here is an existing opportunity to put more of it on the court.