The Field of 68 brings back college basketball’s 24-hour season-opening marathon

Nine years after college basketball’s overnight shift went dark, the 24-hour marathon is waking up from its slumber.

The Field of 68 Media Network will stage eight games over nearly a full day to open the men’s college basketball season on Nov. 2, resurrecting the round-the-clock format that ESPN shelved ahead of the 2017 season. The slate begins with High Point and Liberty at 12:01 a.m. ET in Rock Hill, S.C., rolls through games at 3 a.m. and 6 a.m. and doesn’t stop until Furman and Bethune-Cookman tip at 8 p.m.

For the Field of 68, which launched in the teeth of the COVID-19 pandemic and is now scheduling games during hours usually reserved for deep sleep, the improbable became the itinerary.

“Never,” co-founder Jeff Goodman told The Athletic when asked whether a 24-hour marathon had always been a goal for the company. “We didn’t think we’d ever broadcast a game.”

The digital network began primarily with podcasts hosted by former college and NBA players before gradually moving into live events. Co-founder Rob Dauster traced a turning point to December 2022, when the Field of 68 broadcast a Furman-Stephen F. Austin game as part of a tripleheader in Greenville, S.C.

“I was like, maybe this can be something,” Dauster said.

Something became three games at the Sanford Pentagon in Sioux Falls, S.D., in 2024. Three became six in 2025, split between Sioux Falls and Rock Hill, tipping off at 8 a.m.

This year, the Field of 68 secured NCAA waivers through all 16 participating schools and crossed the last frontier, pushing tipoff past midnight and into the hours college basketball had left untouched for nearly a decade.

The result bears a resemblance to a quirky tradition that once marked the onset of the college basketball season. ESPN launched its Tip-Off Marathon in 2008 with 14 games across five time zones and continued staging versions of it for nine seasons.

Goodman, who previously worked at ESPN, knew the marathon still occupied a soft spot among college basketball die-hards in the years since it was discontinued. But nostalgia was only part of the appeal — Goodman also saw an opening day with an incredibly crowded buffet of games yet a shortage of those worth rearranging the day around.

“There’s a million games at night, and all the really good teams play nobody,” Goodman said. “They don’t want to play anybody because the coaches are scared in the first game. So they just want an easy win, and I’m like, ‘It’s just so boring for the sport to come out of the gates like that.’ ”

Rather than stuffing the schedule with the biggest brands it could find, the Field of 68 went shopping for mid-majors. Eleven of the 16 teams in this year’s field won at least 20 games last season, and five reached the NCAA Tournament — highlighted by High Point, which upset fifth-seeded Wisconsin on its way to the round of 32.

The emphasis on mid-majors is intentional, Dauster said. As college basketball’s financial fault lines widen, the programs being pushed furthest toward the margins are often the ones responsible for some of March’s maddest moments.

“It brings back a lot of the smaller, unique things about college basketball that I feel like we’re losing,” Dauster told The Athletic. “The quirky, unique kind of college basketball-specific stuff is something that we really wanted to lean into with this.”

Full Field of 68 schedule (all times ET):

• 12:01 a.m.: High Point vs. Liberty (Rock Hill)
• 3 a.m.: Grambling vs. Northern Illinois (Rock Hill)
• 6 a.m.: Appalachian State vs. Merrimack (Rock Hill)
• 9 a.m.: Winthrop vs. Queens (Rock Hill)
• 11:30 a.m.: Murray State vs. Tennessee State (Sioux Falls)
• 2 p.m.: UTEP vs. Northern Kentucky (Sioux Falls)
• 5:30 p.m.: UAB vs. McNeese State (Rock Hill)
• 8 p.m.: Furman vs. Bethune-Cookman (Rock Hill)

Finding teams willing to sacrifice a night’s sleep was relatively easy. Finding teams willing to play one another proved considerably harder. Goodman said some programs would commit to the event, then cycle through — and reject — one potential opponent after another.

“Will you play them? No. Will you play them? No,” Goodman said of his conversations with coaches. “You have five options for them, and they say no to all of them.”

“I don’t envy the coaches that have to schedule 30-plus games because I had to do this with eight games — it’s brutal.”

Northern Illinois, led by first-time Division I head coach Matt Majkrzak, will open its season at 3 a.m. ET against Grambling. Dauster described the players willing to begin their seasons at that hour as “absolute sickos, and it’s awesome.”

All eight games will stream on the Field of 68’s YouTube channel and X account, with broadcast crews stationed at each site. Goodman has perhaps assigned himself the weekend’s most unforgiving job: calling all six games in Rock Hill.

His current plan? Work the midnight, 3 a.m., 6 a.m. and 9 a.m. games, retreat to the hotel next door for a possible nap, then return for the 5:30 p.m. and 8 p.m. tips. And whatever sleep cannot cover, Goodman plans to outsource to iced coffee.

“Honestly,” Dauster said, “the biggest thing that I’m worried about is Goodman falling asleep on the screen.”