Many times when the college basketball season starts, smaller schools will travel to some of the blue bloods in the country like Kentucky, UCLA, Duke, North Carolina and the like. They do it so they can end up on national television early in the season, but they also make a ton of money from it. Utah Valley might have gone to the next level with it though as they have scheduled the "toughest 24 hours in basketball" to start their season off.
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So not only will the Wolverines head to Lexington, but they'll go to Durham the next day to play another powerhouse in Duke. Both of those teams are expected to be competing for Power 5 conference titles and UVU had the cojones to schedule them back-to- back, but coach Mark Pope is pretty amped up about it.
"This is what college basketball is supposed to be," said Pope. "We couldn't be more excited to go out and play two of the best teams in the entire country in a 24-hour period. Our goal is to be the best team we can possibly be at the end of the season. We had great success with that last year and part of doing that is putting together the hardest non-conference schedule we can and we've accomplished that."
Those two schools just finished with the top two classes in the 2017 recruiting cycle as well so this looks like quite the challenge for the Wolverines in November. They better hope Duke and Kentucky aren't up to snuff quite yet and they play their best game because that is one of the few scenarios where UVU doesn't start the season 0-2 right off the bat.
[h/t The Spun]
