Midnight Madness (basketball)

Midnight Madness (and variations)
Kansas Jayhawks men's basketball fans wait to attend Late Night in the Phog.
Genre	Athletic exhibition and celebration
Dates	Friday near 15 October
Location(s)	Individual schools
Years active	1970 to 71–present

Midnight Madness is an annual event celebrating the upcoming college basketball season in which a team opens its first official practice to the public, often combining it with a pep rally and other fan friendly activities. The tradition originated from teams holding public practices at midnight on the earliest day that the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) would allow a practice to be held. In 2013, a new NCAA rule established some flexbility around the opening of a team's practice sessions. As a result, the dates on which teams celebrate Midnight Madness can vary, but most stick with the traditional date of a Friday night closest to 15 October.

Prior to the 2013–14 NCAA Division I men's basketball season men's and women's basketball teams were not permitted to practice prior to the Friday closest to 15 October. Maryland Terrapins head coach Lefty Driesell began the Midnight Madness tradition at 12:03 a.m. on 15 October 1971 by inviting the public to a 1.5 mile team run. The early practice session was attended by 3,000 fans at the track surrounding Byrd Stadium on the University of Maryland campus. Driesell continued the annual midnight practice session throughout his tenure at Maryland, and brought the tradition with him when he became head coach at Georgia State University. In 2008, that school delayed the event until sunrise for the first time since Driesell established the tradition.

In 1982, coach Joe B. Hall and the Kentucky Wildcats men's basketball team began to officially promote a celebration dubbed "Midnight Madness" as a school event with formal entertainment acts and an invited student audience. This event was held in Memorial Coliseum and held 8,500 people in the 12,500 seat gym. Big Blue Madness is now televised and hosts celebrities including Drake, who performed in 2014. Another of the more famous events is "Late Night in the Phog" at Kansas, which was started in 1985 by Larry Brown and is now broadcast in live streaming video via the Internet. The event has caught on on most campuses; various programs have given away T-shirts and allowed players do stunt dunks and half court shots. Some schools schedule intrasquad scrimmages, three-point shooting contests and/or slam dunk contests. The event is often a co-ed event, in which both the men's and women's team participate in the celebration, especially at schools like the University of Connecticut, where the men's and women's teams have a combined 13 championships.Scout.com estimated that in 2007, approximately 160 of the top blue chip high school basketball recruits in the country were attending a Midnight Madness event during the weekend that opens the basketball season.