Brief Men's Basketball TV Update for 2015-16

Here's the week-by-week schedule so far.

* Went looking through the American Sports Network website schedule yesterday and a pair of neutral site tournaments appeared there.  One, the Music City Challenge, was alluded to in a recent press release by Stephen F. Austin.  The other one, which is a bit of a surprise, is the Barclays Center Classic on November 27th & 28th.  The schools involved have not yet released the info but the two semifinal games and the championship game are on the schedule, along with the Louisville vs. Saint Louis game in the evening on the 28th.

To my knowledge, the ASN schedule is awaiting selections from the American and Big South conferences.  Games from the A-10, CAA, C-USA, Horizon, Ivy League, MAC, OVC, Patriot League, SoCon, Southland and WAC are already on the site and are on my site (provided I didn't miss any).

* I have always been a bit in awe of the Ivy League with respect to broadcasting contracts & limits, because they don't lock themselves into long term deals and, presumably, their athletic departments don't need the money to stay afloat.  FOX Sports 1 picked up three Ivy League MBK regular season games as part of their schedule, along with setting aside a time slot in the event of an Ivy League playoff game.  Last year the conference scrambled a bit to secure a broadcaster, going with the American Sports Network with a simulcast on ESPN3.

In addition to the Ivy League, the Big East final moves to FOX broadcast network with an early evening start time of 5:30pm ET.  Also, the semifinals will start 30 minutes earlier.  The nice thing about this, assuming no overtime, is that there should be no issues with the second semifinal running into the start of the second Pac-12 semifinal.

6:30pm: Big East semi #1
9pm: Big East semi #2
11:30pm:Pac-12 semi #2

* CBS Sports released their college basketball schedules for their networks on Thursday.  The games I added that weren't previously on the site were seven Friday night MAC wildcard windows (games most likely moved from Saturday), three NEC games and a Southland Conference game.

* The Big South is in process of looking for a new home for their conference tournament, which was to be hosted by Coastal Carolina in Myrtle Beach.  The conference has a rule regarding departing members hosting conference championship events that are not "earned seed" sports (ie. sports where regular season champ is the host).

* Since SMU is not appealing their NCAA tournament ban for 2015-16, I would expect that their tournament will decrease by one game and that the tournament will revert to a ten team tournament with the top six gaining byes to the quarterfinals, similar to the format run by the Big 12, Big East and MVC.  On the other, the Atlantic Sun has elected to allow Stetson to appear in the conference tournament even though they are barred from the NCAAs due to APR sanctions, but has modified their automatic bid criteria.