Most fans view the college basketball regular season as an undifferentiated mess that drags on for a few months and serves as a lengthy prelude to March Madness. There's no equivalent to Opening Day - NCAA teams just start playing in the middle of November and there's no rhyme or reason to a schedule that includes random neutral court games and non-conference tournaments sprinkled throughout a long stream of home games against lesser-caliber teams paid a bunch of money to fill out the schedule.

It can be hard to follow what's going on during the non-conference schedule, especially if you are looking at things from a national perspective. Where things start to get really interesting is after Christmas, with the start of conference play. The two and a half months of the NCAA regular season from January through the first two weeks of March are one of the best-kept secrets in sports. Every game between two conference foes matters and has ramifications not just for March but for the long-term trajectory of each program.

There's no way to compare the quality of play between the NBA and the NCAA but the differences in incentives that the structure of the sports creates mean that NCAA regular season games count for a lot more than NBA regular season games. What happens in the post-season completely overshadows the regular season in both sports - the difference is that NCAA teams play a lot fewer games and each game has much more of an impact on their standing for the post-season.

In an 82-game regular season compressed into six months, no game can be all that important or can have any meaning beyond the night’s box score. In the NBA, there’s always tomorrow night. That’s what happens when teams play four games in five days and 20 games in a little over a month. Even games between longtime rivals and prospective playoff opponents can only be so meaningful when each team is in a different part of their schedule and can’t afford to dictate their line-ups too much or game-plan too heavily for one particular contest.

It’s the exact opposite of what happens during conference play in the NCAA. The number of teams in the major conferences varies but they all play similar schedules - 18 games split between 9 road dates and 9 home dates and not playing the same opponent more than twice. The stakes when Duke plays UNC and when Kansas plays Iowa State and Michigan State plays Michigan couldn’t be higher because those games determine each team’s seeding for the NCAA Tournament and their respective places in the conference pecking order.

No one is on a long road trip reminiscent of the Odyssey that sends them crisscrossing all over the country over the course of a week and has them forgetting what city they are in on a particular night. Teams play at most 2-3 games in a week, which gives them plenty of time to create unique strategies for their respective opponents and plenty of time to work on them in practice. There are no back-to-back games and there are no schedule losses.

NCAA teams get better over the course of the season because they actually have time to practice and work on skill development for individual players. The NBA schedule is built on the assumption that these are the best players in the world and they need to be bring their skills and showcase their games in every corner of the North American continent. That’s true for teams like the Golden State Warriors and the San Antonio Spurs but do teams like the Philadelphia 76ers really need to play 4+ times a week? Wouldn’t they be better off practicing and getting better instead of serving as the Washington Generals?

The non-conference schedule is a 2-month warm-up for the 2-month sprint that is the conference schedule. Everyone knows everybody and every team’s weakness gets exposed because word gets around the league fast when someone figures out a successful strategy to counter someone else. Just look at what happens to Scott Drew’s teams at Baylor in the 2nd half of the Big 12 schedule every season - the reason that teams are so excited for March Madness is they are no longer playing opponents who know them like the back of their hands.

And while the top teams recruit nationally, for the most part, players at even high-major schools tend to stick relatively closely to where they grew up. And since everyone knows everyone else from the AAU circuit, you see a lot of match-ups where guys are playing against opponents whom they have known since they were 10-12 years old. Everyone wants to knock off the big dogs in each conference because they have been forced to live in the shadows of the most heavily recruited players since they were in middle school.

The blue-chip programs, schools like Duke and Kentucky and Kansas and Arizona, tend to wind up on top each year but that doesn’t mean their schedule isn’t a grind. True road games at the NCAA level are always difficult, which is why you rarely see the top teams playing more than 1 or 2 during non-conference season. Even at schools that are more focused on football, the chance for an upset of a Top 10 team when they come to your home gym means a packed house and a coach looking to pull out all the stops to win.

Every game matters because the NCAA selection committee is evaluating everything you do and it all comes into play when it’s time to seed the Tourney. When you watch the selection special in March, you will notice they spend an inordinate amount of time talking about “best wins” and “worst losses”. For a team on the bubble, which is the majority of high-major teams around the country, upsetting one of the top teams in the conference or getting upset by one of the bottom teams can make or break a season. There’s just no such thing as a best win and a worst loss in the NBA - every game counts exactly the same.

Wins and losses can have an impact that goes way beyond one season. The more games you win during the season, the easier it is to recruit and the better your chances going forward of being a competitive program. There’s no draft and there’s no point in tanking to get better - if an NCAA program ever decided to start punting away games, they can go on a tailspin that can take years (or even decades) to get out of. The only way to move up the ladder in the NCAA is to to painstakingly get better year after year and build towards something.

At the end of the day, most people aren’t going to remember what happened in January and February and an early loss or a win streak in March can overshadow a whole season’s worth of work. Nevertheless, that doesn’t mean what happens in those months isn’t important and it doesn’t mean there isn’t a ton of drama and excitement for those who are paying attention. Not much happens in the NBA after Christmas - barring injuries, each team’s place in the pecking order is pretty much set and everyone is just biding time for the playoffs. There’s a lot that happens in the NCAA and the result is interesting and exciting basketball, if you are into that kind of thing.