NEW HAVEN, Conn. – With a decade of remarkable success, including Ivy League regular season championships in three of the last four seasons and four NCAA Tournament berths since 2016, Yale has become a nationally prominent college basketball program. Once again in 2023-24, the Bulldogs will play a schedule worthy of the national spotlight.
Trips to powerhouses Gonzaga and Kansas highlight the 29-game slate which kicks off on Nov. 6 at home. The Bulldogs have 11 dates in the friendly confines of the John J. Lee Amphitheater where they posted a 10-1 record last year.
The 14-game Ivy League schedule begins on Jan. 9 at Brown. A top-four regular season finish would earn Yale another trip to the league's postseason tournament, which is set for the weekend of Mar. 16 in New York City. The Bulldogs have qualified for each of the previous five Ivy tournaments.
More notes on a very challenging 2023-24 schedule:
• The Bulldogs play two teams that finished in the top 10 in the final 2022-23 Net Ratings – No. 8 Gonzaga and No. 9 Kansas. Both also have advanced to the NCAA Championship game in the last three seasons. The Jayhawks captured the NCAA title in 2022, while Gonzaga was the runner up in 2021.
• The games with Kansas and Gonzaga will feature three head coaches – Bill Self (KU), Mark Few (Gonzaga) and
James Jones (Yale) – who combined have coached 77 seasons and won 1,848 games.
• There will be six games against teams that advanced to the NCAA Tournament a year ago – Gonzaga, Kansas, Colgate, Vermont and Princeton twice.
• Seven of the 15 non-conference games will come against teams that won at least 20 games last year.
• Yale travels north of the border to New Brunswick, Canada, in November for the inaugural Atlantic Slam in Moncton. The Bulldogs play three games in three days – vs. Colgate on Nov. 17, vs. Gardner Webb on Nov. 18 and vs. Weber State on Nov. 19.
• There will be two games in the state of California – Nov. 12 against Loyola Marymount and Dec. 30 vs. Santa Clara.
• A pair of Connecticut schools are on the schedule. The Bulldogs host Fairfield on Dec. 6. Yale knocked off the Stags 77-64 last year at the new Leo D. Mahoney Arena. On Dec. 11, Yale makes the short trip to Hamden to face Quinnipiac. It is the first meeting between the teams since 2014. The Bulldogs have won 12 straight games against Connecticut opponents, including a 45-44 win at UConn in 2014.
• Yale faces off against two other New England rivals – at Rhode Island on Nov. 26 and at Vermont on Dec. 2.
• The Bulldogs kick off the new year in Washington, D.C., against Howard on Jan. 3.
• Three of Yale's first four league games will be on the road. The Ivy home opener is set for Martin Luther King Day (Jan. 15).
• Princeton, which edged Yale in last year's Ivy League Tournament championship game, visits Lee Amphitheater to start the month of February. The Bulldogs and Tigers meet in New Jersey on Feb. 17.
• Harvard makes its annual appearance in New Haven on Mar. 2.
