As we creep ever closer to basketball season -- don't get too excited, we're still months away, but those months are melting away with each passing day -- we find it's that time again, the time when ESPN preemptively announces their ESPN College Gameday travel schedule. ESPN is really good at announcing this stuff so early that by the time the season starts, pretty much everyone except the schools involved forget where ESPN Gameday is going, leaving the rest of us to be pleasantly surprised each Saturday morning. It's a nice arrangement, actually.

(Oh, but those schools do remember. Expect every Kentucky student to have something on their Facebook profile about Gameday's visit to Rupp Arena on Feb. 13. ESPN CHOSE US FOR A REASON! WOOO RECE DAVIS I LOVE YOU!!)

Anyway, the College Gameday schedule. You'd probably like to see it. And so, thanks to Awful Announcing's PR inbox, here it is:

Jan. 16: Storrs, CT- Notre Dame at Connecticut (women’s)
Jan. 23: Clemson, SC – Duke at Clemson
Jan. 30: Manhattan, KS – Kansas at Kansas State (7 p.m.)
Feb. 6: Champaign, IL – Michigan State at Illinois
Feb. 13: Lexington, KY- Tennessee at Kentucky
Feb. 20: Seattle, WA – UCLA at Washington
Feb. 27: Syracuse, NY- Villanova at Syracuse
March 6: Durham, NC – North Carolina at Duke

Rush the Court has a nice breakdown of the various games here. But in a more general way, it's worth nothing that College Gameday has managed to not only get to some of the best and most "important" (in so far as college basketball is important in a world at war) locales in the country, they've managed to spread themselves very nicely across the college basketball landscape. Gameday will touch down in every major conference from coast to coast. And they're even getting a women's game in there, too.

Which is why, despite all the things ESPN does to make it so very easy to hate them, us college hoops types are lucky. We could have Mark Schereth's condescending meathead routine; instead we get Jay Bilas and Bob Knight and Steve Lavin and the rest. Hubert Davis is just OK, buteEven the program's two most hateable guys -- Dick Vitale and Digger Phelps, both of whom are by this point basically caricatures of themselves -- are harmless. They're annoying, but usually nothing more.

And the guy pulling the whole thing together, Rece Davis, is a professional of the Fowlerian variety. So I guess I mean to say: WOO RECE DAVIS AND COLLEGE GAMEDAY!! I LOVE YOU!!

Related: College Basketball Media