The Big South Conference has revealed its 2019-20 men’s basketball composite league schedule. The 99-game slate over a nine-week span begins on Thursday, Jan. 2. Each member will play an 18-game unbalanced schedule.
The 11 Big South members will play eight teams twice and two teams once to determine the 2019-20 regular-season champion. League play will feature two three-game weeks (Jan. 20-25 and Feb. 10-15), and each team will have two byes during the conference season. Six Thursday national television appearances on ESPNU or ESPNews — Jan. 16, Jan. 30, Feb. 6, Feb. 13, Feb. 20 and Feb. 27 — will be Wildcard selections 14-21 days in advance.
The Jan. 2 Big South openers feature defending Big South champion Gardner-Webb at Campbell in a rematch of last year’s Big South Tournament Semifinal won by the 4th-seeded Runnin’ Bulldogs over the top-seeded Camels. Three additional squads that played in the 2019 postseason will open on Jan. 2: Presbyterian College, a 2019 CIT quarterfinalist, hosts UNC Asheville in new head coach Quinton Ferrell’s Big South debut; Charleston Southern, which also reached the CIT quarterfinals last year, opens at home against USC Upstate; and Longwood, which advanced to the CBI quarterfinals, begins its Big South slate on the road at Winthrop.
High Point and Radford begin league play against each other on Saturday, Jan. 4. Hampton, which defeated Charleston Southern last year in the CIT to reach the semifinals, begins its Big South schedule that Saturday at home against the Bucs.
Additional schedule highlights include two championship game rematches between Gardner-Webb and Radford (Wednesday, Jan. 8 in Boiling Springs and Saturday, Feb. 29 in Radford), five games on Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Day (Monday, Jan. 20), as well as the regular season concluding on Leap–Year Day (Saturday, Feb. 29). Five teams (Campbell, Hampton, Presbyterian, Radford, Winthrop) will open and close conference action at home, while five squads (Gardner-Webb, High Point, Longwood, UNC Asheville, USC Upstate) start and end with road games.
The 2020 Big South Men’s Basketball Championship will again be the home-site/earned seed format that returned in 2017. First–round games at the No. 6, 7 and 8 seeds open the championship on Tuesday, March 3. The quarterfinals and semifinals will be played at the No. 1 seed on Thursday and Friday, March 5-6, while the highest remaining seed will host the championship game on Sunday, March 8 at 1:00 p.m. on ESPN.
