College basketball

College basketball is basketball that is played by teams of student-athletes at universities and colleges. In the United States, colleges and universities are governed by collegiate athletic bodies, including the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA), the National Association of Intercollegiate Athletics (NAIA), the United States Collegiate Athletic Association (USCAA), the National Junior College Athletic Association (NJCAA), and the National Christian College Athletic Association (NCCAA). These national affiliation organizations may be subdivided into divisions, generally based on the number and level of scholarships that may be provided to the athletes. Institutions that play in Division II of the NCCAA are typically small Bible colleges. Some institutions may have multiple affiliations with the most common being USCAA and NCCAA. The NCAA does not allow this. An institution does not need to join a national affiliation orginaization to play college basketball, but this is very rare. As of 2025, Cheyney, a former NCAA member, fields a team with no national affiliation.

Each affiliation organization comprises conferences into which the vast majority of teams are divided. Traditionally, the location of a school has been a significant factor in determining conference affiliation. The bulk of the games on a team's schedule during the season are against fellow conference members. Therefore, geographic proximity of conference members allows local rivalries to develop and minimizes travel costs. Further, televised road games played in the same time zone as that of the visiting team's fans tend to draw larger audiences, which enhances the value of the media rights.

Institutional compatibility is another factor that may lead schools to band together in the same conference. For instance, as of 2025, all full members of the West Coast Conference are Christian colleges and universities located in the Pacific Time Zone. The Ivy League comprises institutions in the Northeast with similar, high academic standards that prefer to schedule nearly all their conference basketball games on Fridays and Saturdays, except during breaks between semesters, to minimize the disruption caused to the studies of the student-athletes.

Since the 1990s, geographic proximity has gradually become a less important factor in determining conference membership in NCAA Division I, the top tier competition of college basketball in the United States. For instance, the Big Ten Conference was originally composed of institutions in the Midwest. It has since expanded to include members in New Jersey, Maryland and Pennsylvania. On July 1, 2024, the Big Ten admitted four new members, all of which are located in the Pacific Time Zone. The Atlantic Coast Conference (ACC) had a footprint that extended from Maryland to Florida, with all members located in states on the Atlantic Coast in the 1990s. It has since expanded to include members in Massachusetts, New York, Pennsylvania, Kentucky and Indiana. In July and August 2024, the ACC admitted two new members located in California and one new member located in Texas.

The shifts in conference membership are primarily driven by schools seeking lucrative media rights deals and appropriately competitive playing partners for their football programs. In most cases, schools house as many of their sports in the same primary conference as possible. So, the football-driven changes in affiliation lead to changes in the composition of basketball conferences. When a conference loses a member to another conference, it will often try to recruit a replacement from a third conference. This triggers a domino effect, and smaller, less stable conferences struggle to remain large enough to compete at the same level as they had in the past. The smallest NCAA Division I conferences sometimes recruit Division II teams and help those institutions transition to Division I, in order to replace teams they have lost. Sometimes, this is done pre-emptively to make the conference larger and protect it against the possible loss of some of its teams.

Teams are not required to join conferences and may play as independents instead. Chicago State is the most recent independent basketball team in Division I of the NCAA, having competed as an independent for two seasons before joining the Northeast Conference in 2024. Finding opponents can be problematic for an independent team, particularly during the latter part of the season, when most other teams are regularly playing conference opponents. In addition, each conference gets an automatic bid to the NCAA tournament, which generates significant revenue for participating teams. Independent teams do not have access to such a pathway and must be selected at-large in order to participate in the tournament.

Most games between conference opponents take place in the latter part of the season. While there are various rankings of teams throughout the entire NCAA,^[1] there are also conference standings based on the results of games against conference opponents. Once the conference schedule is complete, the conference stages a tournament that includes some or all of its teams. The regular-season conference standings are generally used to determine qualification for and seeding in the conference tournament.

A notable exception to the regular-season standings being used for seeding in the conference tournament were the 2023 and 2024 Western Athletic Conference (WAC) men's and women's tournaments. Regular-season conference standings determined qualification for the tournaments, but seeding was based on a formulaic ranking of the strength of the qualifiers, including their performances against non-conference opponents. Starting in 2025, the WAC returned to seeding the tournament based on the conference standings, and the formulaic ranking became part of the conference's tiebreaker procedure.

In most cases, the winner of the conference tournament receives an automatic bid to the NCAA tournament. However, teams that are in transition to Division I are not eligible to participate in the NCAA tournament. Under rules revised in 2025, the transition period from Division II to Division I generally takes three years and may be longer, if the team is coming from a different affiliation. Therefore, if such a team wins a conference tournament, the conference will use an alternative method to designate the team that receives its automatic bid. Some conferences allow transitioning teams to participate in their conference tournaments; others do not allow this.^[2]