For the first time in more than 21 years, the Colorado men’s basketball team will take on the Michigan State Spartans.
On Tuesday, organizers of the annual Maui Invitational announced the matchups for this year’s tournament, with coach Tad Boyle’s Buffaloes set to face Michigan State in the first round on Monday, Nov. 25, at the Lahaina Civic Center. The game tips off at 3 p.m. MT and will be broadcast on ESPN2.
CU will play either Memphis or two-time defending national champion UConn on Nov. 26. Michigan State likely will be a preseason top 25 team as well as a favorite in the expanded Big Ten Conference.
The Buffs and Michigan State have met just four times, most recently in the first round of the 2003 NCAA Tournament in Tampa, Fla., a 79-64 Spartans victory. MSU is 3-1 all-time against CU, with the Buffs’ only win in the rarely-renewed series dating all the way back to Dec. 28, 1956.
The CU-MSU matchup will be the second first-round game on Nov. 25, with the UConn-Memphis matchup opening the tournament. The Buffs have played UConn just once — also a first-round NCAA loss, in 2016 — but have never faced Memphis, which is coached by former NBA great Penny Hardaway.
As expected, CU’s renewed conference rival, Iowa State, is on the opposite side of the eight-team bracket, with a first-round matchup against Auburn at 7 p.m. MT on ESPNU, following the Buffs and MSU. Dayton and North Carolina play in the final first-round game at 9:30 MT on ESPN2. The Maui Invitational typically brings together teams from eight different conferences, but CU and Iowa State agreed to play in this year’s event prior to last year’s massive conference realignment.
The Michigan State date finalizes the last blank spot on CU’s 2024-25 schedule, which begins on Nov. 4 at home against Eastern Washington. Besides the three games at the Maui Invitational, the nonconference schedule is highlighted by a Dec. 7 home date against Colorado State.
While the specific dates and television information for CU’s return season in the Big 12 will be announced at a later date, the league announced its league pairings earlier this summer, with the Buffs playing home-and-home sets against Arizona State, Central Florida, Kansas, Iowa State and TCU. CU will host games against Baylor, BYU, Cincinnati, Houston and West Virginia while playing single road games against Arizona, Kansas State, Oklahoma State, Texas Tech and Utah.
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