At a recent forum sponsored by the Big 12, Sports Illustrated writer Pete Thamel described his experience at a basketball game between Texas and TCU.
“I almost fell asleep,” Thamel said.
Athletic directors from both schools were sitting with Thamel on the same stage. Neither one of them voiced an objection. In fact, they said nothing.
Thamel’s point was that college basketball is struggling, especially the regular season. The sport is built around March Madness, but what about November, December, January and February?
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Attendance and television ratings remain strong, but schools want to pump up the regular season.
Photo by: Getty Images |
“I think college basketball right now has a giant problem,” the veteran sportswriter said. “The regular season is completely irrelevant.”
While no one disputes the popularity of March Madness and the Final Four, administrators say there are several solutions they’d like to see implemented to help the entire season.
Chief among them is the reversal of the one-and-done rule, which means a player can
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be drafted into the NBA one year after graduation from high school as long as he’s at least 19 years old. That rule has led to many of the best players staying only one year in college and then turning pro.
“I think it’s bad for college athletics and it’s bad for NBA general managers,” Texas Athletic Director Steve Patterson said at the forum. “It makes it more difficult for the fans to establish an emotional attachment with the player.”
The one-and-done rule is negotiated between the NBA and the National Basketball Players Association, as part of their collective-bargaining agreement. And Duke coach Mike Krzyzewski said recently that the issue isn’t going to change because the extra year in school potentially would cost the player millions of dollars. “What we have is probably going to be there for a while,” the Duke coach told ESPN.
In the same realm of player movement, ADs would like to find a way to limit transfers. More than 600 college basketball players hopped from one school to another last season, up from 445 in 2011.
Among the solutions that have been studied to boost the regular season is making basketball a one-semester sport, which would tip off in mid-December. That would push the NCAA tournament deeper into April and maybe early May. But it also would eliminate much of the competition with football in November and part of December. The NCAA men’s basketball committee studied this last year and decided there were too many obstacles, at least for now.
Such an overhaul of the season seems like overkill to some administrators in college basketball. Karl Hicks, the deputy AD at Florida State, previously served as the ACC’s senior associate commissioner for men’s basketball.
“There’s a lot of noise about college basketball that’s focused on the negative and I don’t subscribe to that,” Hicks said. “Time has showed that college basketball is tremendously resilient.”
The numbers back up Hicks’ stance.
ESPN recorded its third straight season of increased TV viewership during college basketball’s 2013-14 regular season. The network’s average of 1.45 million viewers jumped 6 percent over 2012-13 (see chart below). CBS’s viewership was flat versus last year.
And while average attendance across all of Division I dipped slightly last season and has remained flat over the last four years, the Big Ten set an attendance record in 2013-14, drawing an average of 13,534 fans across its 12 schools at the time (see chart below). The conference led the nation in attendance for the 38th straight year.
The Final Four also set a record with 158,682 in attendance for the semifinals and finals at AT&T Stadium in Arlington, Texas. The tournament’s overall attendance record was set in 2013.
So, few of the metrics back up the point that college basketball is irrelevant and needs saving.
