From The Editor's Archives: A Culture of (Non)Change
On Monday, college basketball's opening day came and went without leaving a ripple on the water. Tonight marks Day 2 of the college season, and that too will pass by unnoticed. This is nothing new. College hoops has never excelled at marketing its opening week of play. Want proof? Basketball Times editor John Akers tackled the subject in the April 2007 issue. While some things are different - Lute Olson no longer coaches Arizona, Dick Vitale isn't a "future" Hall of Famer and Dave Cawood has since passed away - the crux of the story remains firm and true: College basketball is fighting the stigma of being a one-month sport. By JOHN AKERS
Basketball Times
(From April 2007 Issue)
By JOHN AKERS
ESPN Radio’s Colin Cowherd was talking about college basketball.
More specifically, he was using his nationally syndicated sports talk show to discuss why college basketball wasn’t even worth discussing until March.
For maybe 30 minutes during a show in February, Cowherd talked about why it wasn’t worth his time to be talking about college basketball.
Whether or not one agrees with Cowherd – and the suspicion here is that if you’ve made it this far in the nation’s only year-round college basketball magazine, you don’t – it’s the root of an opinion held among some who help shape the nation's sports news and commentary. It’s not a prevalent opinion, yet it’s floating out there, held both by editors in media centers with tough choices to make with their limited resources and by columnists and talk-show hosts who, from where they’re sitting, believe what they’re writing or saying is true.
As for March, there can be no debate. It’s Championship Week and Selection Sunday, the Valley and Mason Nation, office pools and sports-bar stools. It’s four days staring at a bank of Las Vegas casino television sets and betting the farm on both the Bruins of UCLA and the Bears of Belmont because you happen to be sitting in a chair shaped like a Chicago Bears football helmet. It’s a month of madness that nets some $300 million annually for the NCAA. But you knew that.
And the season’s preceding four months? Arenas still fill up. There’s a game on a cable channel nearly every night. Compelling plot lines still develop. For the many who are already members of the college-basketball choir – anyone who has attended a Duke-North Carolina or Louisville-Kentucky game or spend any time near Tucson or Storrs – the question/challenge that’s posed by Cowherd and a few others is difficult to comprehend: Has March become such a monster that it has overshadowed itself to the point that college basketball has essentially evolved into a one-month season?
“Anyone who would say that is not very intelligent, frankly,” said Arizona coach Lute Olson. “You take a look at the following for college basketball and the enthusiasm for college basketball, and it would have to be someone who's been in a darkroom for a long time to say that.”
Maybe. Those radio studios can get pretty dark. Yet, there might be more merit to the question than originally meets the ear. It's about prying some of the attention from college football in late November and from the NFL in early January. It's about creating match-ups that anyone would want to watch. It’s about creating Q ratings for the players – rather than just Coach K, the General and Dickie V – that might not rival Peyton Manning or Kobe Bryant but will at least register a ripple of recognition from the casual fan. It’s about discussing areas that might make a great product even better.
And giving Colin Cowherd something more to talk about.
Just For Openers
Quick: What’s the date of Midnight Madness, the first day that college basketball practices can begin? Every good fan knows that it’s on or about Oct. 15.
Now, what’s the date that teams can play their first game? No one knows.
And that’s just wrong.
For the record, (the 2006-07) season opened on Nov. 7 with a 2K Sports College Hoops Classic doubleheader in College Park, Md., and on ESPNU. The games came and went without much notice from anyone but their own fans, if even by them. Louisville opened its season a full 11 days later, against Northwestern State.
The benefits of finding a day or period when all of the games and conversations that come with them are obvious. But while a uniform starting day is great in concept, there are inherent problems that have prevented it from becoming a reality.
There’s football, which is reaching its crescendo just as basketball is pounding out its opening notes. And because of high school playoffs on Fridays, college football on Saturdays and the NFL on Sundays, college basketball would be left to sort through the crumbs of Mondays, Tuesdays, Wednesdays or Thursdays for its opener.
Then, there’s the matter of who gets to open at home and who would be forced to play their first games on the road. Everyone wants to open at home, but that would be an impossible under a uniform starting date or starting period.
Many a man has tried to tackle the problem, only to fail.
“In all of our little worlds,” said Rick Giles of the Gazelle Group, which runs a number of early season events, “we would like to think that we could do something on opening day that would move the meter, that would be truly unbelievable.”
But the reality, Giles said, is that even the best marquee match-ups would be overshadowed in early November by a Texas-Nebraska or Giants-Cowboys football game or even a Lakers-Knicks contest. The difference between the 1.8 television rating that Duke-Kentucky might draw in November and another game’s 1.1 rating is too minimal to be worth the effort to pursue.
That Giles has a say in who might play in November is also what makes college basketball so different from the NBA, NFL or any other professional sport. If the NBA wants the Lakers-Knicks in November, the game is scheduled. If the NCAA wants Duke-Kentucky, it has no real say in the matter. Such a game instead would be driven by a promoter, network or conference.
“The NBA and NFL, there’s no doubt what’s being promoted,” said Dave Cawood, a former assistant executive director for the NCAA. “The NBA and NFL control it all, even the marketing of their players and their teams.”
But efforts are being made to at least point the NCAA’s bus in the right direction, though it has a multitude of drivers. Opening day was a much-discussed topic – along with grassroots basketball – during a September summit in Indianapolis that included representatives from the NCAA, NBA, USA Basketball, the NABC, ESPN, the AAU and high schools and Nike and adidas shoe companies.
“Everyone has embraced a cohesive strategy in this, so it’s a matter of finalizing this and putting it into place,” said Greg Shaheen, an NCAA vice president in charge of men’s basketball and championship strategies. “We would hope this would come together in the coming months.”
One idea to come from the summit was a national scrimmage day early on the practice schedule. Groups of four teams within geographic proximity – but of potentially various pedigree – would meet for a day to scrimmage and give their fans a taste of what’s to come. Think of UCLA, Loyola Marymount, Long Beach State and San Diego State together for a day, just for show.
ESPN’s Jay Bilas believes he has a better idea. He would like to see the NCAA use its Pre-season NIT to create a 16-team, pre-season “national champion.” Bilas said he got the idea after playing on Duke’s Pre-season NIT champion and NCAA Tournament runner-up in 1986. If the Blue Devils had won both titles, they would have become the only team other than CCYN in 1950 to win NIT and NCAA championships in the same season.
“Even though it’s not the national championship, the thought of having a national championship to start the year would give a little more juice to the beginning of the year,” Bilas said.
The questions, the reservations, are whether big-time programs would agree to play and if even such an event as a pre-season national championship could compete with football.
“Teams wouldn’t say it was recognized as a national championship and they put banners in their gym,” Bilas said. “To me, (football) is not the measure. The measure is that it’s better than what we’ve got. We’re not trying to take football fans away. We’re trying to lend some coherence to the basketball season.”
Now, what’s the date that teams can play their first game? No one knows.
And that’s just wrong.
For the record, (the 2006-07) season opened on Nov. 7 with a 2K Sports College Hoops Classic doubleheader in College Park, Md., and on ESPNU. The games came and went without much notice from anyone but their own fans, if even by them. Louisville opened its season a full 11 days later, against Northwestern State.
The benefits of finding a day or period when all of the games and conversations that come with them are obvious. But while a uniform starting day is great in concept, there are inherent problems that have prevented it from becoming a reality.
There’s football, which is reaching its crescendo just as basketball is pounding out its opening notes. And because of high school playoffs on Fridays, college football on Saturdays and the NFL on Sundays, college basketball would be left to sort through the crumbs of Mondays, Tuesdays, Wednesdays or Thursdays for its opener.
Then, there’s the matter of who gets to open at home and who would be forced to play their first games on the road. Everyone wants to open at home, but that would be an impossible under a uniform starting date or starting period.
Many a man has tried to tackle the problem, only to fail.
“In all of our little worlds,” said Rick Giles of the Gazelle Group, which runs a number of early season events, “we would like to think that we could do something on opening day that would move the meter, that would be truly unbelievable.”
But the reality, Giles said, is that even the best marquee match-ups would be overshadowed in early November by a Texas-Nebraska or Giants-Cowboys football game or even a Lakers-Knicks contest. The difference between the 1.8 television rating that Duke-Kentucky might draw in November and another game’s 1.1 rating is too minimal to be worth the effort to pursue.
That Giles has a say in who might play in November is also what makes college basketball so different from the NBA, NFL or any other professional sport. If the NBA wants the Lakers-Knicks in November, the game is scheduled. If the NCAA wants Duke-Kentucky, it has no real say in the matter. Such a game instead would be driven by a promoter, network or conference.
“The NBA and NFL, there’s no doubt what’s being promoted,” said Dave Cawood, a former assistant executive director for the NCAA. “The NBA and NFL control it all, even the marketing of their players and their teams.”
But efforts are being made to at least point the NCAA’s bus in the right direction, though it has a multitude of drivers. Opening day was a much-discussed topic – along with grassroots basketball – during a September summit in Indianapolis that included representatives from the NCAA, NBA, USA Basketball, the NABC, ESPN, the AAU and high schools and Nike and adidas shoe companies.
“Everyone has embraced a cohesive strategy in this, so it’s a matter of finalizing this and putting it into place,” said Greg Shaheen, an NCAA vice president in charge of men’s basketball and championship strategies. “We would hope this would come together in the coming months.”
One idea to come from the summit was a national scrimmage day early on the practice schedule. Groups of four teams within geographic proximity – but of potentially various pedigree – would meet for a day to scrimmage and give their fans a taste of what’s to come. Think of UCLA, Loyola Marymount, Long Beach State and San Diego State together for a day, just for show.
ESPN’s Jay Bilas believes he has a better idea. He would like to see the NCAA use its Pre-season NIT to create a 16-team, pre-season “national champion.” Bilas said he got the idea after playing on Duke’s Pre-season NIT champion and NCAA Tournament runner-up in 1986. If the Blue Devils had won both titles, they would have become the only team other than CCYN in 1950 to win NIT and NCAA championships in the same season.
“Even though it’s not the national championship, the thought of having a national championship to start the year would give a little more juice to the beginning of the year,” Bilas said.
The questions, the reservations, are whether big-time programs would agree to play and if even such an event as a pre-season national championship could compete with football.
“Teams wouldn’t say it was recognized as a national championship and they put banners in their gym,” Bilas said. “To me, (football) is not the measure. The measure is that it’s better than what we’ve got. We’re not trying to take football fans away. We’re trying to lend some coherence to the basketball season.”
Finding Another UCLA-Houston
OK, that’s unlikely to happen again in our lifetime. There can only be one first time, and the UCLA-Houston game of nearly 40 years ago has endured as the “Game of the Century.” Even if a match-up similar to Lew Alcindor’s Bruins and Elvin Hayes’ Cougars – played in Houston’s Astrodome and to a national TV audience – could be replicated, it wouldn’t be the same as it was on Jan. 20, 1968. There have been dozens of No. 1 vs. No. 2 match-ups since then, hundreds of games played in domes and thousands played before nationally televised audiences. The novelty is gone, forever.
Chicago White Sox vice chairman Eddie Einhorn, who put the UCLA-Houston game on the air, was a pioneer in televising college basketball with his TVS network and strung together a marvelous collection of stories detailing the growth of college basketball in his book, “How March Became Madness.” Burke Magnus, vice president and general manager of ESPN U, is sort of a modern-day Einhorn, overseeing college content for ESPN.
Playing match-maker Houston-UCLA or UCLA-Notre Dame was difficult in Einhorn’s day, and Burke said it remains so today.
“It’s getting harder and harder to get top teams to play each other in December,” Magnus said, “when they don’t have a lot to gain and could have a lot to lose.”
Without the premier December match-ups, there it little outside pre-season tournaments, traditional match-ups such as Kentucky-Louisville and intra-conference agreements such as the ACC-Big Ten Challenge and one between the Big 12 and the Pacific 10 conferences that will debut next season to focus the casual fans’ interest on college basketball. Thank goodness for the ACC-Big Ten Challenge that brought us North Carolina-Ohio State in late November.
“If it wasn’t for that event, can you imagine North Carolina and Ohio State playing each other this season?” asked Magnus. “It probably wouldn’t happen in a million years.”
The best thing that the NCAA can do to assure that quality match-ups occur in November and December is to make certain that the tournament selection committee gives them equal importance during that second weekend in March. Shaheen maintains that the committee does indeed give those games the weight they’re due.
“Ask Butler University about that,” Shaheen said.
Chicago White Sox vice chairman Eddie Einhorn, who put the UCLA-Houston game on the air, was a pioneer in televising college basketball with his TVS network and strung together a marvelous collection of stories detailing the growth of college basketball in his book, “How March Became Madness.” Burke Magnus, vice president and general manager of ESPN U, is sort of a modern-day Einhorn, overseeing college content for ESPN.
Playing match-maker Houston-UCLA or UCLA-Notre Dame was difficult in Einhorn’s day, and Burke said it remains so today.
“It’s getting harder and harder to get top teams to play each other in December,” Magnus said, “when they don’t have a lot to gain and could have a lot to lose.”
Without the premier December match-ups, there it little outside pre-season tournaments, traditional match-ups such as Kentucky-Louisville and intra-conference agreements such as the ACC-Big Ten Challenge and one between the Big 12 and the Pacific 10 conferences that will debut next season to focus the casual fans’ interest on college basketball. Thank goodness for the ACC-Big Ten Challenge that brought us North Carolina-Ohio State in late November.
“If it wasn’t for that event, can you imagine North Carolina and Ohio State playing each other this season?” asked Magnus. “It probably wouldn’t happen in a million years.”
The best thing that the NCAA can do to assure that quality match-ups occur in November and December is to make certain that the tournament selection committee gives them equal importance during that second weekend in March. Shaheen maintains that the committee does indeed give those games the weight they’re due.
“Ask Butler University about that,” Shaheen said.
Too Many Star-Less Nights
Cowherd and other college-basketball detractors contend that any game whose most recognizable figures wear hard-soled shoes to contests is a game with serious flaws. There can be no denying that folks such as Mike Krzyzewski, Bob Knight and Dick Vitale are the most visible stars of college basketball. It has always been that way, even when there was a three- or four-year turnaround for the game’s top players. Dean Smith was at North Carolina long before and well after Michael Jordan made a name for himself there.
The Hall of Fame candidate Vitale will be allowing himself to be carried up rows of fans until they have to carry him out of the arena.
But while it is difficult for ESPN to quantify whether fans tune in because of Vitale – or, in some cases, despite him – or because of the game, since he is assigned to most of the biggest games, the ratings do spike when a J.J. Redick or an Adam Morrison emerges as a true college star. But star players rarely hang around the college game for as long as Redick and Morrison did, so the networks, the conferences and the NCAA will continue to promote their coaches and the “front of the jersey.”
College basketball doesn’t have the fantasy leagues of the NFL or the rotisserie leagues of baseball that drive fans to follow and even form bonds with players. And there is no single player-of-the-year award like college football’s Heisman Trophy, but rather an assortment of awards handed out by the U.S. Basketball Association, the Associated Press, the NABC and the folks who represent the Naismith, Wooden and Rupp awards. There’s little chance that the different parties will be unifying any time soon.
“The Heisman, that’s all people talk about,” Magnus said. “Some players drop out, and some move up. It’s a way to lead people through the season and to build stars.”
The hotly debated NBA age limit is the latest twist on the star-making process, of course. The Year of the Freshman has begun to establish such stars as Texas’ Kevin Durant, Ohio State’s Greg Oden and North Carolina’s Brandan Wright just as they’re likely to leave school for the NBA, before they’re names have begun to resonate with most casual fans. Durant is Basketball Times’ national player of the year, and BT won’t be alone in making him the nation’s first freshman to win such an award.
“I don’t know what freshman has been better than he’s been,” said Kansas coach Bill Self. “You could make a case for (Wayman) Tisdale, but I don’t think so. (Tisdale wasn’t) as complete a player. I work with Danny (Manning) every day, and Danny says (Durant has) got him beat by a large margin, and (Manning) was a national player of the year. Carmelo (Anthony) led his team (to a national title), but I don’t know if that’s the same level of freshman talent.
“Find someone who was better at the same age. I don’t know if there has been anybody.”
No one is debating Durant’s talent, but questions abound about where the NBA rule will lead college basketball and whether it’s even ethical for schools to pursue players that are likely to leave after a single season. Knight put a headline on the potential hypocrisy of the one-year player, of course, during a weekly Big 12 Conference call last month, calling the rule “the worst thing that’s happened to college basketball since I’ve been coaching.”
Coming from the nation’s winningest coach, the comments became the source of a nationwide debate.
In case you missed it, he said: “Now you can have a kid come to college for a year to come play basketball, and he doesn’t even have to go to class,” Knight said. “He certainly doesn’t have to go to class the second semester. I’m not exactly positive about the first semester. But he would not have to attend a single class the semester to play through the whole second semester of basketball.
“And that, I think, has a tremendous effect on the integrity of college sports.”
Whatever freshmen leave after this season won’t be college basketball’s first. Stephon Marbury, Dajuan Wagner, Chris Bosh, Charlie Villanueva are just a few of those who were one-and-done before the phrase became an expectation of many.
And what remains still unknown is how many freshmen actually will leave after this season. Could it be as many as the eight who jumped from the prom to the pros out of high school for the 2004 draft? Or, if some first-year players determine that they could another year or two at the college level, could it be limited to an obvious few? Could the Year of the Freshman evolve into the Year of the Sophomore, or are we entering into a long spin cycle of freshmen at the forefront?
Next season’s class of freshmen should at least arrive on campus, as scheduled. At one time, that wasn’t a certainty.
The upcoming class was one that was brought up on the idea that the best high-school seniors directly to the NBA. This year’s class was, too, but Oden is a good student who always at least professed a desire to play college basketball. Durant, too, showed an interest in school.
But a few of the leaders of the upcoming class – O.J. Mayo, Michael Beasley, Derrick Rose – were suspected to be the first who might challenge the NBA rule, either directly or by going a different route to the NBA, such as Europe. A story in “High School Hoops,” a magazine published by The Sporting News, drove home the possibilities.
“I’m pretty sure someone will challenge it,” Beasley told the magazine. “I would challenge it. You can’t be 18 to get a job (in the NBA), but you can be 18 to go fight in Iraq? That just doesn’t add up if you ask me.”
“There’s loopholes out there,” said Reggie Rose, Derrick’s brother. “All it takes is one kid to take that direction and there will be a chain reaction. All it takes is one shoe company to bite on one kid and give him a $20 or $30 million shoe contract to go to an academy or overseas.”
Opinions have changed since that story was published. And that’s despite a serious knee injury to a formerly prominent member of their class – ex-Mayo teammate Bill Walker, who pushed through high school early to lay at Kansas State this season – that might have driven the risks of playing college ball home to them. The attention given Durant might have helped sway some opinions. And when Sonny Vaccaro left the shoe business, the seniors lost a champion who might have led their challenge. When Mayo, the leader of this class, accepted the idea of playing at USC in LA’s major media market, the decision effectively was made for all.
“They’ve accepted the jury’s decision,” said Vaccaro, who agreed that their decisions will likely influence classes that follow. “They would have been perfect candidates. At one time, they were all full of excitement. It had to happen with this class.
“Now it’s settled in and none of the young kids will even think there’s a chance to (challenge or work around the NBA rule). It’s going to be two years, and then it will be going on three.”
And that, to a teen-ager, is a lifetime.
*****
TV ratings of the NCAA Tournament has been on a steady decline since 1979 – the year of the Magic Johnson-Larry Bird final – but that's only because of the advent of cable television. Tournament and regular-season attendance has held steady over the past five or six seasons, at about 600,000 for the tournament and about 25 million for the regular season. According to a Gallup poll last season, 41 percent of Americans say they are college basketball fans.
And yet, if picking and choosing from among all the stories in all the different sports, one can at least understand why talking heads and pencil pushers might first choose the NFL, NBA, baseball or NASCAR. They're backed by a singular marketing push. Their athletes are recognizable. Though it’s difficult, if not impossible, to prove, their fans might seem less provincial than the college fan who locks onto his team and the conference it plays in.
But even if March Madness diminishes the season's first four months – and that's still a very big “if” – would anyone want to change anything about it?
”Very few sports,” said Einhorn, “can focus for a full month like this one does.”
Einhorn believes March could be enhanced even further by promoting conference tournaments as an extension of the NCAA Tournament even beyond ESPN’s present “Championship Week.”
If football’s BCS is the example of what’s wrong with college sports, basketball’s tournament is generally viewed as everything that’s right about it. While Lee Corso and Kirk Herbstreit still have meaningful games and the BCS to debate into the final week of the regular season, Bilas and Digger Phelps can discuss the RPI, seeding and bubble teams. Bilas argues that, counter to common knowledge, more regular-season games in college basketball count than in college football.
“Remember a couple of years ago, when Auburn was undefeated (in football)?” Bilas said. “None of their games counted. They were undefeated, and not one of their games counted, because they didn’t get to compete for a national title.”
Perhaps the greatest arguments for college basketball have been made in CBS’s $6 billion investment in the NCAA Tournament through 2011 and in the number of games televised by ESPN nightly.
In Einhorn’s book, How March Became Madness, former CBS president Neal Pilson wrote: “Eventually CBS made a decision to give up the NBA and to stay with college basketball because we felt it was a more important property. And that is true to the present day.”
And it’s certainly true for ESPN, too.
“It’s the core of what we do,” Magnus said. “There are more college-basketball games on the air than probably any other single sport. And we’re not just doing it because there’s nothing else to do. We absolutely couldn’t survive without it.
“If it was a one-month sport, there’s no way we’d be doing 800 games and pulling audiences that are in the millions for the past couple of years. It’s way bigger than that.”
The Hall of Fame candidate Vitale will be allowing himself to be carried up rows of fans until they have to carry him out of the arena.
But while it is difficult for ESPN to quantify whether fans tune in because of Vitale – or, in some cases, despite him – or because of the game, since he is assigned to most of the biggest games, the ratings do spike when a J.J. Redick or an Adam Morrison emerges as a true college star. But star players rarely hang around the college game for as long as Redick and Morrison did, so the networks, the conferences and the NCAA will continue to promote their coaches and the “front of the jersey.”
College basketball doesn’t have the fantasy leagues of the NFL or the rotisserie leagues of baseball that drive fans to follow and even form bonds with players. And there is no single player-of-the-year award like college football’s Heisman Trophy, but rather an assortment of awards handed out by the U.S. Basketball Association, the Associated Press, the NABC and the folks who represent the Naismith, Wooden and Rupp awards. There’s little chance that the different parties will be unifying any time soon.
“The Heisman, that’s all people talk about,” Magnus said. “Some players drop out, and some move up. It’s a way to lead people through the season and to build stars.”
The hotly debated NBA age limit is the latest twist on the star-making process, of course. The Year of the Freshman has begun to establish such stars as Texas’ Kevin Durant, Ohio State’s Greg Oden and North Carolina’s Brandan Wright just as they’re likely to leave school for the NBA, before they’re names have begun to resonate with most casual fans. Durant is Basketball Times’ national player of the year, and BT won’t be alone in making him the nation’s first freshman to win such an award.
“I don’t know what freshman has been better than he’s been,” said Kansas coach Bill Self. “You could make a case for (Wayman) Tisdale, but I don’t think so. (Tisdale wasn’t) as complete a player. I work with Danny (Manning) every day, and Danny says (Durant has) got him beat by a large margin, and (Manning) was a national player of the year. Carmelo (Anthony) led his team (to a national title), but I don’t know if that’s the same level of freshman talent.
“Find someone who was better at the same age. I don’t know if there has been anybody.”
No one is debating Durant’s talent, but questions abound about where the NBA rule will lead college basketball and whether it’s even ethical for schools to pursue players that are likely to leave after a single season. Knight put a headline on the potential hypocrisy of the one-year player, of course, during a weekly Big 12 Conference call last month, calling the rule “the worst thing that’s happened to college basketball since I’ve been coaching.”
Coming from the nation’s winningest coach, the comments became the source of a nationwide debate.
In case you missed it, he said: “Now you can have a kid come to college for a year to come play basketball, and he doesn’t even have to go to class,” Knight said. “He certainly doesn’t have to go to class the second semester. I’m not exactly positive about the first semester. But he would not have to attend a single class the semester to play through the whole second semester of basketball.
“And that, I think, has a tremendous effect on the integrity of college sports.”
Whatever freshmen leave after this season won’t be college basketball’s first. Stephon Marbury, Dajuan Wagner, Chris Bosh, Charlie Villanueva are just a few of those who were one-and-done before the phrase became an expectation of many.
And what remains still unknown is how many freshmen actually will leave after this season. Could it be as many as the eight who jumped from the prom to the pros out of high school for the 2004 draft? Or, if some first-year players determine that they could another year or two at the college level, could it be limited to an obvious few? Could the Year of the Freshman evolve into the Year of the Sophomore, or are we entering into a long spin cycle of freshmen at the forefront?
Next season’s class of freshmen should at least arrive on campus, as scheduled. At one time, that wasn’t a certainty.
The upcoming class was one that was brought up on the idea that the best high-school seniors directly to the NBA. This year’s class was, too, but Oden is a good student who always at least professed a desire to play college basketball. Durant, too, showed an interest in school.
But a few of the leaders of the upcoming class – O.J. Mayo, Michael Beasley, Derrick Rose – were suspected to be the first who might challenge the NBA rule, either directly or by going a different route to the NBA, such as Europe. A story in “High School Hoops,” a magazine published by The Sporting News, drove home the possibilities.
“I’m pretty sure someone will challenge it,” Beasley told the magazine. “I would challenge it. You can’t be 18 to get a job (in the NBA), but you can be 18 to go fight in Iraq? That just doesn’t add up if you ask me.”
“There’s loopholes out there,” said Reggie Rose, Derrick’s brother. “All it takes is one kid to take that direction and there will be a chain reaction. All it takes is one shoe company to bite on one kid and give him a $20 or $30 million shoe contract to go to an academy or overseas.”
Opinions have changed since that story was published. And that’s despite a serious knee injury to a formerly prominent member of their class – ex-Mayo teammate Bill Walker, who pushed through high school early to lay at Kansas State this season – that might have driven the risks of playing college ball home to them. The attention given Durant might have helped sway some opinions. And when Sonny Vaccaro left the shoe business, the seniors lost a champion who might have led their challenge. When Mayo, the leader of this class, accepted the idea of playing at USC in LA’s major media market, the decision effectively was made for all.
“They’ve accepted the jury’s decision,” said Vaccaro, who agreed that their decisions will likely influence classes that follow. “They would have been perfect candidates. At one time, they were all full of excitement. It had to happen with this class.
“Now it’s settled in and none of the young kids will even think there’s a chance to (challenge or work around the NBA rule). It’s going to be two years, and then it will be going on three.”
And that, to a teen-ager, is a lifetime.
*****
TV ratings of the NCAA Tournament has been on a steady decline since 1979 – the year of the Magic Johnson-Larry Bird final – but that's only because of the advent of cable television. Tournament and regular-season attendance has held steady over the past five or six seasons, at about 600,000 for the tournament and about 25 million for the regular season. According to a Gallup poll last season, 41 percent of Americans say they are college basketball fans.
And yet, if picking and choosing from among all the stories in all the different sports, one can at least understand why talking heads and pencil pushers might first choose the NFL, NBA, baseball or NASCAR. They're backed by a singular marketing push. Their athletes are recognizable. Though it’s difficult, if not impossible, to prove, their fans might seem less provincial than the college fan who locks onto his team and the conference it plays in.
But even if March Madness diminishes the season's first four months – and that's still a very big “if” – would anyone want to change anything about it?
”Very few sports,” said Einhorn, “can focus for a full month like this one does.”
Einhorn believes March could be enhanced even further by promoting conference tournaments as an extension of the NCAA Tournament even beyond ESPN’s present “Championship Week.”
If football’s BCS is the example of what’s wrong with college sports, basketball’s tournament is generally viewed as everything that’s right about it. While Lee Corso and Kirk Herbstreit still have meaningful games and the BCS to debate into the final week of the regular season, Bilas and Digger Phelps can discuss the RPI, seeding and bubble teams. Bilas argues that, counter to common knowledge, more regular-season games in college basketball count than in college football.
“Remember a couple of years ago, when Auburn was undefeated (in football)?” Bilas said. “None of their games counted. They were undefeated, and not one of their games counted, because they didn’t get to compete for a national title.”
Perhaps the greatest arguments for college basketball have been made in CBS’s $6 billion investment in the NCAA Tournament through 2011 and in the number of games televised by ESPN nightly.
In Einhorn’s book, How March Became Madness, former CBS president Neal Pilson wrote: “Eventually CBS made a decision to give up the NBA and to stay with college basketball because we felt it was a more important property. And that is true to the present day.”
And it’s certainly true for ESPN, too.
“It’s the core of what we do,” Magnus said. “There are more college-basketball games on the air than probably any other single sport. And we’re not just doing it because there’s nothing else to do. We absolutely couldn’t survive without it.
“If it was a one-month sport, there’s no way we’d be doing 800 games and pulling audiences that are in the millions for the past couple of years. It’s way bigger than that.”
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