Nov. 3. 2025 ... Opening Night!
To the membership,
Are you feeling what I’m feeling? Every October-into-November, that certain sensation of anticipation settles in that I can hardly bear. It’s a tingle of anxiousness and eagerness.
It’s been so long since San Antonio.
But the season has finally arrived once more, and with it, four of the best words are again our reality: college basketball is back.
That creep up to November always seems to make October crawl as the longest of any offseason month. I look around at the state of college basketball and in that wide view I see so much to be excited about. This is a sport that’s set to have an outstanding season, mostly because the talent level should be superb and at match with, or in excess of, many of the best seasons across the past 10 years. A parade of high-profile coaching retirements, foundation-altering changes to the NCAA and the looming threat of tournament expansion over the past four years haven’t stopped college basketball — men’s and women’s — from producing a terrific product.
The game is what matters most and the game continues to endure.
In this upcoming season on the men’s side, we could have Purdue’s Braden Smith — potentially — break Bobby Hurley’s career assist record. At Texas Tech, JT Toppin returns to the sport as a First Team All-American as well, giving college hoops a good dose of familiarity (alongside Smith, PJ Haggerty, Donovan Dent, Otega Oweh and more) to pair with one of the best freshman classes of the past 10-plus years.
Even better news: Take a look at the schedule in November and December. You’ll routinely see preseason Top 25 teams matched up against each other on a weekly basis, much more than what populated the slate in the 2010s and even a bit into the early 2020s. There can always be more ambition when it comes to nonconference scheduling, but at least the coaches and television networks are collaborating with intention to improve the relevancy of college basketball long before we get to the heart of conference play. I can’t recall an opening two months with more high-end teams facing each other than the 2025-26 slate.
Many fixes are needed, and some unnecessary non-fixes seem fated, but overall? You can make an open-and-shut case college basketball is in a better situation now than it’s been in a long time.
It’s why I’m humbled and enthused to be the president of the United States Basketball Writers Association amid such an important season for the sport. And in this, the 70th year of the USBWA, we’re planning some big celebrations and commemorations that will look back at the history of the game over the previous seven decades.
Over the next five-plus months, I look forward to talking with many of you and helping to work together to make the United States Basketball Writers Association an organization that increases its relevance, gets younger by bringing on talented youthful voices, and continues to fight for the rights of sports journalists covering college basketball — from the biggest conferences and schools to the smaller outposts all across the United States. Some of the best writers in the history of sports journalism — and American journalism, period — have been members of this organization. They’re in our Hall of Fame.
College basketball media has been significantly impacted by industry forces going on more than a decade at this point, but it hasn’t dampened the intelligence, zeal and creativity from the men and women who write about, talk about and cover the sport. Every year, I take a moment at the Final Four to soak in just how busy and bustling the press room is. We’ve got a special thing here, and hopefully it can get better in the years to come.
I’ll have more to share in the weeks ahead, but as for what the USBWA continues to do for the membership, I did want to include this piece of action from back in the spring. After encountering some troubling issues with one high-profile school when it came to adhering to NCAA media policies, the USBWA took concise and respectful action to ensure all schools and their SIDs are following protocol for media access both at the conference tournament level and during the NCAA Tournament. The issue went far enough up the chain that the Division I men’s basketball committee amended its media guidebook over the summer to include mandates for all schools to allow for player and coaching interview access throughout the postseason.
And as leagues become more ingrained with television networks and all that comes along with exorbitant media-rights deals, it’s important to keep the access of USBWA membership at the forefront. We’ll continue to stay in contact with all leagues as it pertains to access, but in particular, the USBWA will work with the power conferences to champion the best possible media seating and interview protocols for the league tournaments.
The USBWA is traditionally an organization of writers, but it must evolve to include input from people in all forms of modern media: digital talent, podcasters, on-air journalists and beyond. No matter the medium, everyone starts from the same point. The game and its coaches and players are about to provide us with thousands of angles and outcomes to examine, investigate and analyze. How will you go about telling those stories?
Let’s have a fabulous season, everyone.
Matt Norlander
2025-26 USBWA President
President's Letter: Welcome to the 2025-26 college basketball season
