Who is responsible for moving the start of the college basketball season up from its traditional Thanksgiving weekend start?

That is the question I get from sports information directors, marketing directors, radio station engineers and programming directors who are pushed to their limits because they are forced to produce a college football game and a college basketball game on the same day.

Who decided we should move the basketball season-ticket drives up to the start of the football season, move the basketball press day up into the middle of the football season and then play the first basketball games on the same day as a football game? How does this make any sense?

Clearly we must all be missing the obvious benefits of this scheduling change. Surely we must be doing this to make more money for our athletics departments.

But how do we make more money when we aren't playing any more games -- even though we have extended the season by two or more additional weeks?

How do we make more money when we force loyal fans to choose between going to the football game or to the basketball game?

How do we make more money when we force either the football radio broadcast or the basketball radio broadcast on to a smaller sister station and then split the audience between the two?

How do we make more money when we force loyal sponsors to accept advertising on a smaller radio station with a smaller audience because our own actions are splitting the audience?

Then we must be doing it to get more publicity and exposure for basketball programs, right?

But how do we get more exposure when we are forcing newspapers to split their already limited space between two games?

How do we get more publicity when the TV networks are jammed with the most important football games of the year and don't have enough air time to show all the classic rivalry games that take place during the last two weeks of the football season as it is?

How do we get more publicity when sports information staffs have to update Web pages for two major sports on the same day with no extra help?

Then we must be doing this because it is good for student-athletes, right?

But how are we helping the players when we reduce the time before preseason practice starts to just the month of September instead of giving them two-thirds of the semester to actually feel like a student?

How are we helping student-athletes by allowing the basketball season to dominate their lives for two-thirds of both the fall and spring semesters when we are already taking the end of the basketball season into April?

I know that basketball coaches have complained that their sport always has been shorted because of all the attention directed at football. But moving the season up two weeks is not the solution. Now, nobody gets a fair shake.

College presidents and athletics directors need to realize there are few, if any, benefits to this situation. They must take action and move the start of the basketball season back to where it belongs next year -- Thanksgiving weekend.