Candid Coaches: Most Division I men’s basketball coaches say the regular season still isn’t long enough as it expands for 2026-27

College basketball’s regular season is getting a small expansion for 2026-27, and yet a large majority of Division I men’s coaches interviewed for CBS Sports’ “Candid Coaches” series still argued that the season remains too short to fully separate teams over the long run. The conversation lands in the final week of the 2026 series, where CBS reporters Gary Parrish and Matt Norlander polled nearly 100 coaches earlier in the summer and fall through a set of anonymous questions about the sport’s evolving shape.

In the latest installment, the specific rule change is modest: the regular season will expand by one game for 2026-27. Even with that adjustment, coaches told Parrish and Norlander that the overall length is still insufficient, framing the issue less as a need for more novelty and more as a structural problem that affects how teams prepare, how accurately the standings reflect quality, and how much margin there is for learning and adjustment.

The “Candid Coaches” series is built around honesty exchanged for anonymity, and CBS described this as the seventh question in a sequence that drew responses from nearly 100 men’s Division I coaches. This matters because the reactions are coming from the people who feel the day-to-day tradeoffs most acutely: balancing nonconference experiments, managing practice time, and trying to keep rosters fresh while still demanding real performance every week.

Coaches’ comments, as summarized by CBS, also reflect the modern calendar reality. College basketball now asks programs to compress development work, nonconference evaluation, and conference positioning into a finite number of dates, all while preparing for postseason scheduling that can hinge on late-season form. When the regular season is tight, it can increase the cost of one or two off nights, and it can reduce the number of opportunities a team has to prove consistency against different styles and personnel.

At the same time, expanding the schedule by one game raises questions beyond length. One additional game can shift travel planning, practice windows, load management, and the rhythms of conference play, even if the change is incremental. It can also affect how programs view early-season benchmarks, because each extra date potentially increases the “sample size” of the body of work that ultimately decides tournament and postseason positioning.

For fans, the most immediate watch point is how leagues and teams handle that one-game growth in 2026-27, including whether programs lean into additional nonconference work or whether the expansion is absorbed in a way that maintains established conference structures. For coaches, the watch point is whether any further calls for additional games are muted or amplified once the extra date is actually on the books and the sport has lived through the 2026-27 cycle.

CBS’ reporting does not indicate a new, larger reform beyond the one-game increase, and the poll is a collection of opinions rather than an official vote. Still, the recurring theme in this installment is clear: many coaches are pushing for a longer regular season not because they want an endless schedule, but because they believe the current length still leaves too little room for the full range of what a season is supposed to measure in college basketball.

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