College Basketball Road Trips

 I had the idea this year of going on 1 or 2 college basketball road trips. The whole purpose is to see multiple games over a weekend. We established some loose rules about the trip:

  1. They had to be on a weekend when my friend didn't have his kids
  2. The locations have to be driving distance to central Illinois
  3. We have to see at least 3 games in the trip - at least 2 on Saturday and then one either Friday or Sunday (or both, if it works out).
  4. Division 1 teams are the priority, but if there's room in the schedule, we aren't against seeing a D2/D3/NAIA game or two.

After looking at somewhere in the neighborhood of 275 schedules, here's the possibilities we came up with:

December 17-18-19:
Friday 12/17: Franklin College (D3, Indiana) 7:00
Saturday 12/18: Cincinnati vs Texas Southern 12:00, Xavier vs Marquette 4:00
Sunday 12/19: Illinois-Chicago vs Northern Illinois 1:00

January 14-15-16:
Friday 1/14: Purdue vs Nebraska 6:30
Saturday 1/15: Marquette vs Seton Hall 11:00, UW-Milwaukee vs IUPUI 2:00, Wheaton College (D3, Illinois) 7:00

January 28-29-30 (option 1):
Saturday 1/29: Belmont vs UT Martin 2:00, Vanderbilt vs Georgia 5:00
Sunday 1/30: Purdue vs Ohio State 12:00

January 28-29-30 (option 2, not as attractive of an option due to the distance between Louisville and Murray State):
Saturday 1/29: Louisville vs Duke 11:00, Murray State vs Morehead State 4:00
Sunday 1/30: Purdue vs Ohio State 12:00

February 11-12-13:
Friday 2/11: UW-Milwaukee vs Wright St 7:00
Saturday 2/12: Wisconsin vs vs Rutgers 1:00, Univ of Wisc Oshkosh (D2) vs Univ of Wisc La Crosse 7:00
Sunday 2/13: Loyola-Chicago vs Northern Iowa 3:00

We're leaning towards the December 17-18-19 trip and the first January 28-29-30 trip. The January 14-15-16 trip narrowly missed the cut - we were concerned about seeing 3 games in 1 day and then driving home that night (we would get back pretty late). On the January 28-29-30 trip, there's a pretty long distance between Nashville (Belmont and Vanderbilt) and West Lafayette (Purdue). If that Purdue/Ohio State game started at like 2:00, that would be ideal. Since it's overnight, we do have time, but we won't get as much sleep as we would have liked that Saturday night.

I'll post an update after some first decisions are made.

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