In a little more than a half-day, coaches, players, fans and media alike will begin congregating at gyms on college campuses around the country to celebrate one of the most unique traditions in all of sports — Midnight Madness. Even though nobody actually holds their season-opening fan frenzy at the witching hour anymore, the name has hung on for dear life, perhaps in the hope that some enterprising schools will someday bring back the doppelganger of Lefty Driesell’s creativity.

As far as we can tell, about half of last year’s NCAA Tournament field will hold an event on Friday night, highlighted by the star-studded shows at Kentucky, North Carolina, Kansas, Michigan State and aired throughout the evening on ESPNU. Another 15 or so will hold some kind of celebratory event on a separate day, and the remainder for some unconscionable reason are taking the year off. If we got something wrong as far as the details, shoot us an email and we’ll fix it. We’re going to be watching all the coverage and keeping track of the events around the country throughout Friday evening, so feel free to tweet @rushthecourt and/or contact us at rushthecourt@yahoo.com if you have some great photos, videos or simply anecdotes and rumors to share.

Here is a list of last season’s NCAA Tournament teams (along with a few other prominent basketball schools) who will be holding a season-opening celebration TONIGHT (major h/t to Jeremy Pfingsten for doing the heavy lifting and research on this piece). We’ll have the stragglers listed a bit later this weekend.

FRIDAY NIGHT EVENT (note: ESPNU will begin its coverage from Bloomington, Indiana, at 5 PM ET)

A number of other schools are having Madnesses later this month — we’ll put up a separate post with details of those events soon. ENJOY THE MADNESS!!!!

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