Could Michigan State basketball soon play summer games?

John Calipari brought up the idea of playing summer ball. Could we soon see Kentucky vs. Michigan State basketball games in July?

Anyone else miss Michigan State basketball already or is it just me? The season only ended a month ago but it has felt like an eternity. What if we didn’t have to wait until November to watch MSU play again? What if MSU’s next game was only a month away and against another powerhouse program?

FOX Sports analyst John Fanta interviewed Kentucky’s John Calipari and asked the Hall of Fame coach what he thinks of the idea of summer college basketball games. Calipari responded with extreme enthusiasm about the idea and even discussed what it’d be like to play MSU in the summer.

Calipari said, “Let’s just say we played Michigan State in Rupp Arena. We would have a sold-out crowd, amazing atmosphere, and we could get that on big-time TV.”

Who wouldn’t want to watch that?

John Calipari on playing college basketball games in the Summer from an interview with @John_Fanta..

Sign me up for a Kentucky-Michigan State game in the Summer. pic.twitter.com/5FCr5hYfst

— Andrew Cumbow (@ACumbow) May 4, 2023

Imagine MSU vs. Duke at the Breslin Center in mid-July. Even without the Izzone leading the crowd in cheers, the Breslin Center would still be sold out and rocking like it’s a key Big Ten mid-February game.

Obviously these games would just be glorified scrimmages and have no impact on the actual regular season, but I struggle finding one reason why this would be a bad idea. This would give your team a chance to get incoming freshman some much needed experience, allow your staff to experiment with new lineups and give the fans some much needed entertainment during the stale summer months with limited competitive sports.

Once the NBA Finals and Stanley Cup Playoffs end in June, the sports schedule gets extremely bare with only baseball and golf on TV. Adding a couple college basketball games to the mix would immediately garner national attention, making the TV networks extremely interested in televising these games. Calipari even had the idea to have conferences meet up at one location to play multiple games against each other. Picture the Big Ten and ACC doing an annual summer challenge featuring each team playing one game in a city like Indianapolis or New York. Again I ask, who wouldn’t want to watch that?

The only negative someone could argue against this idea is risk of injury. Yes, that does exist, but teams still schedule scrimmages in the offseason and have their own intense practices, so adding in one or two summer games really wouldn’t increase the risk of injury that much. Also, if a team doesn’t want to partake in these games, they don’t have to. If the risk of injury is too much for them then they simply just don’t have to participate.

Tom Izzo is famous for saying they’ll play “anyone, anywhere, anytime.” Knowing the drive and passion Izzo has for getting the most out of his teams, I think he would be completely on board for this and would travel anywhere to play anyone and host any team that would like to make the trip to East Lansing.