Mark Pope endorses 40-game regular season in college basketball

Just two months ago, the NCAA voted to increase the college basketball regular season from 31 games to 32 games beginning in the 2026-27 season. This was done to encourage more high-profile non-conference games and multi-team events, such as the Maui Invitational, the Players Era Tournament and the Battle 4 Atlantis.

This mark of 32 games, however, still isn’t enough for Kentucky head coach Mark Pope. Pope, who is headed into his second season at the helm in Lexington, is campaigning for a 40-game regular season. This would mean a team that played all 40 regular season games and won their conference tournament and NCAA Tournament would have played *at most* 51 games in the span of a little over five months.

“I would love to get to 40 (regular season games),” Pope told Matt Norlander on this week’s edition of CBS Sports‘ “Eye on College Basketball” podcast. “This year, we added two exhibition games against DI schools (Georgetown and Purdue), which I’m fine with. Let’s just go play. And then next year we add the other (extra game). So for me, we’ve gone from 31 to 34 in my mind. Man, can we squeeze in six more?

“I’ll tell you why. Our guys do better academically during the season than out of the season. Two, when our guys go to the NBA, they’ve played a 31-game season. That means by the time they get to the All-Star break, they’ll feel like they’ve played two seasons already. They still have 60 games left to play, so I’m not sure it’s a great prep for moving into the NBA at all. Three, our teams turnover so much because of the current environment (which I’m all in for) but to give our teams a chance to go through a couple of evolutions in one season that they used to go through in one or two or three seasons to get through those evolutions of growth, now we’re trying to squeeze it into one season.”

Pope’s point is basically that the sport of college basketball used to boast successful teams that had been playing together for four years, constantly evolving that chemistry. In the day and age of the Transfer Portal, where teams are completely re-tooled in the offseason, he would like to give those guys more time (and opportunities) to gel as a team.

“We could use some more games. And, our fans get to know these players more. Every single game last year our fans got to know our guys so much better. Our fans deserve it. When you tie it all to revenue share, there’s nobody that’s going to complain (players, coaches, fans) about getting to 40 games where everyone capitalizes off the 40-game revenue share model.”

For now, Pope will just have to be content with 31 regular season games with an extra coming following this upcoming season. Teams have had the option to play 31 regular season games since the 2006-07 season.