All this represents only a fraction of your ability to multi-task through the entertainment universe. And yet some of us in the media act as though you can only follow one sport at a time.
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No kidding. Every sport played for spectators’ benefit in this country intersects with the seasons of several other sports, but when it comes to college basketball and college football there is this curious contention you are capable of only following one of those sports at a time.
In fairness, the media have come to believe this in part because the commissioners of various conferences – yes, talking about you again, Larry Scott – and occasionally some basketball coaches have argued the small overlap between the seasons of college football and college hoops is suffocating to the latter.
Scott, who is in charge of the Pac-12 Conference, has argued periodically college basketball should start its season later so that it would be contained to a single college semester, even if that means playing the NCAA Tournament – you know, the deal we call March Madness – in April or May. This, of course, would require that you then multi-task among the NHL playoffs, NBA playoffs and the early part of the Major League Baseball season.
We’re not here to talk about the past, though. We’re talking about why anyone would get the idea that merely because the final two college football teams played the final game of their season Monday that all of a sudden a vast stream of now-unencumbered Americans are going to come flooding into college hoops fandom.
It’s a fantasy.
The people who care about the sport have cared since the first ball was tossed in the air on Nov. 13. If they cared less over the subsequent six weeks than they will over the next two months, it is because of the way the season is structured, with the game’s most ardent customers fed a few too many warmed-over appetizers during the pre-conference schedule and so many of the most intriguing matchups outsourced to neutral sites.
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How do we know you’ve been paying attention?
Here’s one way: for the 2014-15 college basketball season, from the buy-game-bog at the beginning to the crackling conference competition at the end, the top 10 programs in home attendance averaged 18,709 fans per game.
For the 2015-16 college season to date, with programs having played only a couple league home games at most and the majority of schedules filled with (to use Dick Vitale’s terminology) Cupcake City, those same programs have averaged 17,751 fans per game.
So that means we’re missing 958 people.
Figuratively, I mean. They aren’t staying home because of Star Wars, or holiday shopping or because they have to break down game film so they can be ready for their favorite school’s football game on Saturday. They’re staying home waiting for BYU-Gonzaga or Kentucky-LSU or North Carolina-Duke.
It has been argued television ratings are more important and a better barometer for the sport than attendance, which is a bit of an overstament, but certainly the television audience matters.
When the Champions Classic was played in mid-November, the WatchESPN service recorded its largest audience to that point for a college basketball telecast and the Kentucky-Duke game drew an audience of 3.12 million. It was the 14th-most viewed cable program of the week, even though it was stuffed into a day in which ESPN ran 31 consecutive hours of live college basketball.
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To be honest, television ratings matter more to the people in the television business than they necessarily do to you. Ratings only impact the consumer if they affect what will or won’t be shown; the contracts to air major-conference basketball, with only one exception, all stretch several years into the next decade. Games will be on.
Is college basketball a “niche’ sport? Of course. Every sport save for the NFL is a niche sport. College football’s niche is bigger; golf’s is smaller.
Some prominent national sports talk hosts have taken to arguing college basketball is a “one-month sport,” and we know which month that is. It is a position of convenience. The national host must maintain a firm grip on what is transpiring in the NFL because of its enormous audience and, to a lesser extent, MLB. He or she can keep track of what’s important in the NBA merely by following the adventures of its six or seven biggest stars; why do you think Kobe Bryant gets such a regular bashing for playing meagerly in his final lap around the league? Because he’s famous. Period.
It is understood the audience for college basketball grows dramatically as the game enters the NCAA Tournament. It’s also true the audience for the Super Bowl dwarfs even the excellent ratings drawn by NFL regular season and playoff games.
It does not mean the sporting media needs to condescend to those who’ll pop in on Super Sunday and say, “Hey, we know you’ve been busy watching the Real Housewives; here’s what you’ve missed since September.”
