In a nod to its four West Coast newcomers, the Big Ten will hold its men’s and women’s basketball tournaments in Las Vegas one time each in the next four years, the league office announced Wednesday.

The news comes eight days after Big Ten commissioner Tony Petitti announced that Indianapolis’ Lucas Oil Stadium will remain as host of the Big Ten football championship game through 2028.

Las Vegas’ T-Mobile Arena will host the 2027 women’s and the 2028 men’s basketball tournament. The Pac-12, the former home of new Big Ten members USC, UCLA, Oregon and Washington, staged its men’s basketball tournament at T-Mobile Arena from 2017 to 2024; its women’s tournament had been held at other Las Vegas venues since 2019.

Other men’s basketball tournament future sites includes Indianapolis’ Gainbridge Fieldhouse in 2025 and ’27 and Chicago’s United Center in ’26. Gainbridge Fieldhouse also will stage the ’25 and ’26 women’s basketball tournaments, while Detroit’s Little Caesars Arena will host for the first time during the 2028 tournament.

“I’ve been really pleased in the interest from cities across, not just from the football side, but men’s and women’s basketball was just really good,” Petitti told The Athletic last week.

It’s a similar move to the…

Oregon women’s volleyball coach Matt Ulmer admits he was nervous but hopeful when the Big Ten announced the upcoming volleyball schedule.

“I had no idea what it was going to look like for the four West schools,” Ulmer said. “But at least at the end of the day, I think they did a really good job of keeping in mind not missing class.”

With Oregon, Washington, USC and UCLA entering the Big Ten in August, the 18-team Big Ten stretches from the Atlantic to the Pacific oceans and across four time zones. Strategic scheduling and travel were more imperative this year than ever before for the Big Ten staff, especially for Olympic sports like women’s volleyball, of which each school has 20 conference matches.

To ensure the West Coast members avoid hardships beyond on-floor competition, the Big Ten office solicited feedback from its coaches on double-play opponents. In collaboration across the athletic departments, there was a goal to bunch together as many trips as possible and limit missed class time.

2024 #B1G Conference Volleyball Schedule Announced https://t.co/2hgUQ9gdq2

— Big Ten Volleyball (@B1GVolleyball) June 12, 2024

The West Coast schools all face one another home-and-home and split matches with the other 14 schools home or away. Those seven road trips east are…

RANCHOS VERDES, Calif. — Palm trees, a Pacific Ocean view and courtyard dinners at the Terranea Resort provided the backdrop this week for one of the Big Ten’s most important group of meetings in the league’s 128-year history.

More than 100 administrators, university leaders, faculty representatives and head coaches from the Big Ten’s 18 members and league office gathered at this plush, picturesque location to discuss an upcoming legal settlement that fundamentally will change college athletics. Those officials were sequestered with security for every function, ranging from outdoor meals to friendly mixers.

The topics weren’t limited to what’s known as the House v. NCAA case, which will cost the NCAA and its member schools $2.7 billion should it be approved. The league added a four-school West Coast wing starting this year, and the spring meetings were as much of a networking event as an opportunity to explore a path forward as a league and an industry.

“I think that we have a chance at this moment right now in college athletics to really reshape the model in the most meaningful way in our lifetimes and maybe the most meaningful way that has ever been,” said Illinois athletic director Josh Whitman, the new Division I Council chair. “How can we build this new…

By Bruce Feldman, Nicole Auerbach and Christopher Kamrani

Washington State athletic director Pat Chun is leaving to join archrival Washington, program sources confirmed to The Athletic on Tuesday. Chun’s move comes one day after Washington State men’s basketball coach Kyle Smith announced he was leaving for Stanford, who joins the ACC this year.

Washington State remains one of the two remaining members of the Pac-12 conference.

Chun spent a half-dozen years at WSU after serving as FAU’s athletic director. Chun led the Cougars through a very turbulent time in recent years, most notably with the school being left behind when the Pac-12 collapsed. Washington and Oregon were able to join USC and UCLA in the move to the Big Ten, and the fallout from that upheaval is still being felt around Pullman.

Chun, an Ohio native, has Big Ten roots having spent 15 years at Ohio State working in the Buckeyes athletics department. He was considered a candidate for the OSU AD vacancy this winter, but the job ended up going to Texas A&M’s Ross Bjork.

The Chun move comes a week after Troy Dannen accepted Nebraska’s athletic director job just six months after he arrived at Washington. Dannen is replacing Trev Alberts, who left to become the AD at Texas A&M, replacing Bjork.

“I love Pat,…

The Athletic has live coverage of Selection Sunday and the Women’s NCAA Tournament bracket reveal

The final full day of conference tournaments has come and gone, and wow, what a jam-packed slate. We ultimately came away without any upsets that would put a potential at-large bid in question, but we witnessed some great games and competition.

For the first time since 2002, Kent State is headed to the NCAA Tournament. California Baptist, in Year 6 as a Division I program, earned its first ticket to the Big Dance. Norfolk State matched last season’s win total and tied its program DI record with 26 wins this season after punching its ticket to the tournament as well, back for a second straight year. Fairfield won its 31st game of the season, outlasting Niagara in one of the most frenetic games of the past few weeks to secure its trip to March Madness.

Get your women’s March Madness printable bracket

In the most anticipated game of the day, Princeton won the Ivy League championship comfortably, likely denying the possibility of the Ivy as a two-bid conference.

So on Selection Sunday, as we dive into our final Bracket Watch, a quick thank you for following along. We have a wealth of tournament coverage coming as the brackets are revealed (8 p.m. ET, ESPN) on the selection show. You…

LAS VEGAS — At halftime of the Utah-Arizona State first-round conference tournament game, the Pac-12 mascots engaged in a game of musical chairs. As the mascots started to get eliminated — Tommy the Trojan, Wilma the Wildcat, then Puddles the Duck — it was hard not to think of the state of the conference as a whole, especially when Benny the Beaver was the only one left with a chair (or rather, inflatable donut).

Some PAC-12 mascot musical chair fun pic.twitter.com/ldRYc7SMDG

— Malaina Humphreys (@mmalainaa) March 7, 2024

 

In the chaos of conference realignment, most of the Pac-12 schools grabbed any available chair they could find, no matter what league it came in. Ten schools jumped ship, leaving Oregon State and Washington State clinging to the remnants of a once-proud conference, like Benny holding onto that inflatable for dear life.

In Las Vegas during the Pac-12 tournament, the conference’s cloudy future dampens the mood of the festivities. Even as teams celebrate big wins, they’re left lamenting the fact that these opponents won’t be on their schedule next season, that the coaches they’ve formed lasting bonds with won’t be making the trip to their arenas anymore. There are still resumes to build and a championship to win, but an undercurrent of sadness…

(Editor’s note: This is part of the Bracket Central Series, an inside look at the run-up to the men’s and women’s NCAA Tournaments, along with analysis and picks during the tournaments.)

Power conferences understandably dominate discussion, particularly Bubble Watch talk, this time of year. All the teams fighting in the middle, yearning for resume-supplementing wins, provide some of the most notable matchups and storylines.

However, it’s worth pausing and noting some of the more under-the-radar seasons in the country, especially the programs that we are trending toward hearing about in March. I can think of few teams more deserving of that mention than Marshall.

The Thundering Herd are 20-6, a standout record on its own but even more notable when recognizing this is the first time since the 2016 season they have eclipsed the 20-win mark and just the second time since they left the Southern Conference in 1997. This is West Virginia native Kim Caldwell’s first season at the helm in Huntington. She led her alma mater, DII Glenville State, for seven seasons, including a national championship in 2022. In her first foray as a head coach at the highest level of collegiate basketball, something special is brewing.

Find it your local newspaper #WeAreMarshall

IOWA CITY, Iowa — With Washington, Oregon, USC and UCLA joining the Big Ten in August, the league has already finalized new scheduling models for football, men’s basketball and women’s basketball that prioritize competitive balance, geography and rivalries. The next scheduling phase involves Olympic sports with the same key tenets steering the process as their higher-profile colleagues, but cost and travel have an even greater impact.

On Feb. 19-20, Big Ten officials and school athletics administrators will meet at league headquarters in Rosemont, Ill. to discuss and perhaps finalize scheduling principles for fall Olympic sports. The spring sports likely will settle plans in May. With different priorities guiding each sport, scheduling ideas have ranged from true rotations to regional preference to even some sports on the same campus traveling together to save costs.

“In terms of some of the efficiencies, I don’t think that has been discussed as much because you’re talking about principles right now and not dates,” Iowa athletic director Beth Goetz said. “So if you’re going to figure out if there can be shared travel, you’re going to have to have the actual schedule in front of you to do that.”

GO DEEPER

Big Ten to invite 15 teams to conference hoops…

College softball is back. The season begins Thursday with a flurry of preseason tournaments, including the Puerto Vallarta College Challenge kicking everything off with a matchup between reigning champion Oklahoma and Utah Valley at 11:30 a.m. ET.

It all leads up to the Women’s College World Series, which begins May 30 and features the eight top teams in Oklahoma City. The final two will play a best-of-three series, with the national champion crowned on June 6 or June 7.

Before the action begins, here’s The Athletic’s preseason college softball top 25. Final 2023 rankings are based on the ESPN.com/USA Softball Top 25.

1. Oklahoma (2023 final rank: No. 1)

The Sooners are vying for their fourth consecutive national championship — and they’re well-equipped to do it. Oklahoma returns four first-team All-Big 12 selections from last season: INF Tiare Jennings, P Nicole May, C Kinzie Hansen and INF Jayda Coleman, the reigning conference player of the year. Though ace Jordy Bahl transferred to Nebraska, coach Patty Gasso struck gold in the transfer portal with the addition of Kelly Maxwell, a former Oklahoma State pitcher who led the Cowgirls to three consecutive WCWS appearances and shared 2022 Big 12 pitcher of the year honors with Bahl.

2. Stanford (No. 3)

The Cardinal are…

HOUSTON — The coaching profession is a nomadic lifestyle. Coaches and their families bounce around from town to town amid changing jobs. Sometimes you buy a house, sometimes you rent. Sometimes you don’t need all your furniture.

That’s why Washington head coach Kalen DeBoer’s old kitchen table is currently in Michigan running backs coach Mike Hart’s house, a transaction made in Bloomington, Indiana.

“My wife bought it from him when they were moving out to Fresno,” Hart said with a laugh on Saturday.

Much has been made of the Indiana reunion between DeBoer and quarterback Michael Penix Jr. in Seattle, but the roots from IU connect through both Michigan and Washington ahead of Monday’s national championship.

GO DEEPER

Michigan-Washington film: Unique, contrasting offenses clash in national championship

The 2019 and 2020 Hoosiers under Tom Allen produced the program’s best two-year stretch in three decades: 8-5 in 2019 and 6-2 in 2020. Seven people from that staff and roster are involved in this championship.

• Washington head coach Kalen DeBoer (IU offensive coordinator in 2019)
• Michigan running backs coach Mike Hart (assistant from 2017-20)
• Washington co-defensive coordinator William Inge (assistant from 2013-19)
• Washington tight ends coach Nick Sheridan…