LAKE CHARLES - The three-time defending Southland Conference champion McNeese Cowboys basketball team will open up the 2026-27 season against UAB on November 2 as part of the Field of 68 Opening Day Marathon.
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The game will be played in Rock Hill, South Carolina at the Rock Hill Sports & Event Center and will be one of eight games on the day spanning 24 hours of action. Rock Hill is one of two locations for the marathon, the other being Sioux Falls, South Dakota where McNeese played in the event in 2024.
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This year's opener against UAB will be a special one for second-year head coach
Bill Armstrong, who is a 2001 graduate of the school and where he began his coaching career as a graduate assistant.
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"Playing in the Field of 68 Opening Day Marathon against UAB is a tremendous opportunity for our team and program to be able to participate in a premier event against a quality opponent with a rich tradition of postseason success," said Armstrong. "Competing on a national stage allows us to showcase our program's rise as one of the top mid-major programs in the country.
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"It's also a deeply personal matchup for me to face-off against my alma mater, where I not only played for five years, but also where I started my coaching career as a graduate assistant, which in turn, changed the trajectory of my life. The game also provides a chance to mee up with my mentor, (UAB head coach) Andy Kennedy, who was one of the all-time great players at UAB, for whom I have the utmost respect. You know his teams are going to play extremely hard and throw multiple looks at you. It will be a fantastic challenge to open the season and see where we stand."
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The Field of 68 is reviving college basketball's opening-day 24-hour marathon, nearly a decade after ESPN discontinued the event. The Field of 68 ran three games at the Sanford Pentagon in Sioux Falls in 2024, which McNeese participated, then doubled that to six games across two sites in 2025, adding Rock Hill.
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This year's event expands again into a full round-the-clock schedule and secured an NCAA waiver to begin at midnight Eastern, with High Point facing Liberty as the opener in Rock Hill. The rest of the day unfolds in staggered windows across both sites. Grambling plays Northern Illinois at 3 a.m. in Rock Hill, followed by Appalachian State-Merrimack at 6 a.m. and Winthrop-Queens at 9 a.m. The broadcast shifts to Sioux Falls at 11:30 a.m. for Murray State-Tennessee State and again at 2 p.m. for UTEP-Northern Kentucky, before returning to Rock Hill for UAB-McNeese at 5:30 p.m. and a Furman-Bethune Cookman nightcap at 8 p.m., which the Field of 68's After Dark show follows.
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All eight games stream on the Field of 68's YouTube channel and on X, with the broadcast crew split across both sites. Randolph Childress and Matt McCall will alternate analyst duties across the six Rock Hill games, with Jeff Goodman calling all six alongside them; Sam Ravech handles play-by-play for three of those six. In Sioux Falls, Rob Dauster and Terrence Oglesby serve as analysts, with Alex Heinert on play-by-play.
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"The schedule to open the college basketball season has been awful for years with the best teams in the country playing bottom-feeders, sometimes even non-D1 opponents," said Jeff Goodman, co-founder of the Field of 68. "Fans wanted us to bring the 24-hour marathon back, and we wanted to create some of the best mid-major matchups in doing so."
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Eleven of the 16 teams involved in this year's field won at least 20 games last season, five reached the NCAA tournament, and nine are projected to win their respective conferences this year. High Point, Murray State, McNeese, and Furman are considered among the four strongest mid-major programs in the country entering the season, with High Point standing alone in the field as the only team that won a tournament game last March.
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McNeese is working to finalize its 2026-27 schedule, however, the Southland Conference will release the league slate this Thursday.
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