Unusual venues make nonconference games more memorable

MILWAUKEE >> Two of the more notable games on Friday’s college basketball schedule are taking place on an aircraft carrier and in a baseball stadium.

No. 2 Gonzaga will face Michigan State on the flight deck of the USS Abraham Lincoln in the San Diego harbo r to celebrate Veterans Day. Wisconsin is playing Stanford at American Family Field, the retractable-roof park that is home to the Milwaukee Brewers.

Staging neutral-site games in non-traditional venues isn’t new. Michigan State coach Tom Izzo has scheduled games at many different sites over the past two decades.

“We’ve been ‘Outside the Box U’ for 20 years and other people are catching up,” Izzo said. “That’s good, and that’s why I didn’t want to pass up this game.”

Izzo’s penchant for this began in 2003, when Michigan State lost to Kentucky in front of 78,129 fans at Ford Field, the home of the NFL’s Detroit Lions. Soon enough, plenty of late-round NCAA Tournament games started taking

place in football stadiums.

This won’t be the first time Izzo has coached a game on an aircraft carrier.

Michigan State lost to top-ranked North Carolina in November 2011 on the flight deck of the USS Carl Vinson as President Barack Obama and first lady Michelle Obama watched from courtside.

Stanford coach Jerod Haase was a North Carolina assistant coach for that 2011 game. Now, he’s preparing his team to play the first basketball game at a baseball-only stadium since San Diego faced San Diego State in 2015 at Petco Park, home of the Padres.

“It’s an experience for our guys to talk about when

they’re old like me, about how they played in a baseball stadium,” Haase said.

The offbeat settings come with potential obstacles, particularly when they’re outdoors. The roof will be closed for the American Family Field doubleheader that includes a women’s game between Wisconsin and Kansas State.

The 2011 North CarolinaMichigan State game on a carrier finished less than an hour before rain fell.

A year later, condensation on the respective courts wiped out an Ohio StateMarquette game aboard the decommissioned USS Yorktown in Charleston, South Carolina, and a Georgetown-Florida game aboard the USS Bataan in Gainesville, Florida. Florida and Georgetown did play the first half before the game was scrapped.