CBS Sports reported Tuesday that Notre Dame and Villanova are close to finalizing an agreement to open the 2026-27 college basketball season with a doubleheader in Rome. The proposed twin bill would see the Irish and Wildcats square off in both men’s and women’s basketball as the first games of the new season.
The monumental arrangement is rooted in religious connections. Palazzetto dello Sport, the proposed 3,500-seat venue for the event, sits just over 3.5 miles from the Holy See. While Notre Dame operates as the globe’s preeminent institution of Catholic higher education, the newly elected Pope Leo XIV is a 1977 graduate of Villanova, an Augustinian Catholic university just outside of Philadelphia.
It is yet to be confirmed whether the pontiff will have any involvement in the event or its surrounding festivities. An avid sports fan, the Chicago-born leader of the Catholic Church made headlines for supporting the Chicago White Sox, and the subsequent jeering from crosstown rival Chicago Cubs fans who make the pilgrimage to the Vatican.
The official start date of the college basketball season is Monday, Nov. 2, 2026, but the NCAA granted special permission for the universities to compete a day earlier, on Sunday, Nov. 1. Although unique, opening a season abroad is not unheard of in college athletics, especially for the Irish. Head coach Niele Ivey’s women’s basketball program embarked on the 2023-2024 campaign in Paris against South Carolina, and the football team has held a week one contest in Dublin in 2012 and 2023.
The event will mark a handful of firsts for college athletics as well. The contest between Micah Shrewsberry’s Irish and Kevin Willard’s Wildcats will be the first men’s season opener abroad, and it’s the first Division I basketball game to be played in Italy. It was actually Willard who first teased the event, telling college basketball reporter Jon Rothstein that his program had added the Irish to its upcoming schedule during a podcast appearance on Tuesday morning. It only took a few hours before Rothstein’s CBS colleague Matt Norlander scooped that the event would include both schools’ women’s programs in a blockbuster international spectacle.
It is expected that the games will be played in the Roman afternoon, corresponding to the American morning. With FOX set to nationally broadcast both games, the doubleheader will serve as matinee coverage leading into weekly NFL production. Although unconfirmed, Norlander reported that the men will open the festivities with the women’s game to follow on Fox Sports 1.
