With the burgeoning excitement of this year’s Men’s NCAA Tournament, we are in the midst of something special. Something men’s college basketball has been waiting for through a decades-long drought of sound teams and also-rans sharing prestige in sports’ greatest event. College basketball has a powerhouse. A true powerhouse.
It has been thirty-nine years since men’s basketball saw an undefeated season. The 1976 Indiana Hoosiers were the last, running the table and finishing 32-0 in their championship year. Through the good years and the great teams, no one has since finished unblemished, even if the blemishes were faint. But it will happen this year.
The Kentucky Wildcats are that team without blemishes. The undisputed heavyweights in a class of featherweights, Kentucky is tall and athletic, and nasty and impenetrable. If they were an NBA team, they would be the second-tallest in the league. And they would be vying for a playoff spot. Kentucky needs only a few more wins to finish their season 40-0, and they will win without issue.
But is this good for the sport? College basketball is faltering. Outside of the sensation around March Madness and the obligatory filling out of brackets, national focus on the sport is nearing null. 2008 had record low television viewership and this year was not much better. The National Championship Game in 2014 had half the TV audience that it did twenty years ago. Half. Why is that?
One can point to the movement en masse of freshman talent. The best in the sport often leave for the NBA draft after one year in college, leaving little room for the sport’s great players to become household names while still in school. That’s absolutely true, but in reality, that cannot be the sole reason—only nine freshmen entered last year’s NBA draft, not necessarily the mass migration that seems to be ruining the sport.
In a sense, with great players leaving early, it can actually create more attention. Last year, all eyes were on Andrew Wiggins and Jabari Parker, who were destined to be selected first and second in the upcoming NBA draft. The hype around Parker and Wiggins was actually magnified because their arrival in the NBA was imminent. People wanted to know if Parker and Wiggins were truly worth the gamble of early draft picks. Their flash-in-the-pan careers created a sensation. If their tenures in college were more drawn out, the hype surrounding them would not have been as intense.
If these players leaving early are not the problem, is it the lack of scoring? Offense has steadily declined in college since 2000, leaving the NCAA to experiment with a reduced shot-clock of 30 seconds (down from 35), in theory creating more possessions and quicker opportunities to score. The decrease in action on the court could certainly be keeping viewers away, but teams scoring in the low-50s and 60s can’t be the reason that half the number of people tuned into the 2014 Championship game than the one in 1994. Were half of those people so disgusted and bored by a few fewer points that they refused to tune in?
In all sports, what keeps viewers away is a simple lack of interest. What turns them away is the knowing that no one else really cares, that there is no public attention and therefore little reason to watch. What draws people in is a team that has a story behind it and is worth watching because it matters in the grand scheme of the sport.
Even without rooting interest, people have watched and will continue to watch Kentucky this year simply to witness. To wonder if this is the team that can go undefeated. To say that they saw this team play and it was the greatest they’ve ever seen. College basketball needs this. Just ask the women’s side.
2010 was a banner year for women’s college basketball. It saw record attendance, high television ratings, front-page press, and the greatest run of success it may ever know. Through the course of 2010, the UConn Women’s Basketball Team challenged UCLA’s venerable 88 game winning streak, an unreachable record that had stood in front of college basketball for nearly four decades. But the team played an underappreciated sport, a sport that garners hardly any national attention for even its greatest accomplishments, with the exception of maybe “two paragraphs in USA today and one line on the bottom of ESPN” as Huskies coach Geno Auriemma sees it.
Popular momentum blossomed into a national story as the year moved on and it seemed all too obvious that UConn would in fact break UCLA’s record. But the nation was not holding its breath to see if UConn could in fact pull it off (the team outscored opponents by an average of 33 points during the streak). They tuned in simply to see it happen.
In their record-breaking game against Florida State, the Huskies played in front of 16,000 people at the XL Center in Hartford, beyond the arena’s capacity. In an ensuing game against Stanford, the game in which UConn’s streak ended, ESPN2 broke its record for viewership. More people watched the game than two simultaneous NBA games on TNT and a college football bowl game on ESPN.
It was a low-scoring game. Neither team had what could be called superstar or household names. But people watched to see something happen. They watched because they knew that they would be reading about it, talking about it and watching its highlights the next day. They watched because it was sensational, because there was a story. UConn brought interest back to the game. And Kentucky can do the same.
Kentucky has done the same, if only to a small degree. Television ratings are still down this year, but the Wildcats played in four of this season’s six most-viewed games. Kentucky’s game against Arkansas in the SEC conference tournament had the highest TV audience the conference has seen in five years. The team’s coach John Calipari has constant interview requests and he nails them all. If Kentucky does lose in the Tournament, there will be national frenzy. If the team makes it to the championship game, it will without a doubt be the most-watched and most-talked about in those twenty long years.
Kentucky carries the burden that the UConn Women did. They must bring interest back to a hobbling sport. They must move the trend back to college basketball’s era of giants. Geno Auriemma made it work for his team, and he knew what it meant for the sport: “Like it or not, we made you pay attention.” •
