March Madness. All you have to do is say those two little
words and you conjure up memories for most red-blooded Americans who like to
watch college basketball. When I think of college basketball I remember
watching The Big East Conference or at the time the Pac-10 Conference game of
the week every Saturday when I was a teenager. I could look at most teams and
name just about every player on most rosters or at the very least be familiar
with all the players names. Oh, how times have changed.
I don’t get the same amount of joy watching college
basketball anymore. To me, it’s a difficult game to watch. People are going to
say “the game is pure” or “they play it because they love the game” or “it’s
the same game it’s always been.” You want to know what I say to that? To put it
appropriately, I call bs.
The product is not very good at all in my opinion. People
like a good product on the court or field when they go watch their teams, but
right now they are not getting their monies worth.
Everybody knows that the NBA is a player’s league, well,
NCAA college basketball is a coach’s league and let’s just say that the coaches
are micromanagers of their players. Every possession is grinded out like they
are trying to figure out if there was somebody on the grassy knoll. The players
are not allowed to freelance to much because that means lost possessions to the
coach and it probably means that the player will find himself on the end of the
bench or seated right next to their coach getting an ear full of discipline, so
to the player it doesn’t benefit them in any way to play a little loose and
free. The free movement of basketball isn’t there for college basketball
because the college coaches want to play the game in a phone booth and not out
in the open like it should be.
After watching Pac-12 (Pac-10 as a youngster) basketball all
my life and in person the last couple of seasons it is readily apparent that
players don’t have the same skill set as they once had. Oh, sure, there are the
occasional anomalies that come with that ability to do everything, such as
Jahlil Okafor, but for the majority of players coming into college basketball
they have one skill they can do. Some have good ball handling, some are decent
shooters, some rebound or play solid defense, but there are not players that
leave college being better players than they were when they came into college
basketball. Why?
Let’s be honest about what has happened in big time Division
One college basketball. The one and done player is killing the game. Many of
these players are just not ready to play on the Division One level, but have
talent so the coaches are pressured to play these kids and suffer through the
growing pains. The other aspect of college basketball is that it’s just a minor
league for the NBA. When players have the opportunity to leave after a semester
in college, the product on the floor will suffer greatly. These players are not
ready for the professional ranks after four months in college.
College basketball is to the point of being unwatchable to
many sports fans like myself. It’s slow, can be ugly, and it is unskilled. For
the people that tell me that a 50-48 defensive ball game is fun to watch, I
just roll my eyes. If I want to see two people mugging each other I will just
watch the next episode of “Law and Order”.
There are wrestling matches in the paint, secondary
defenders getting charges off stupid calls, guards playing hand to hand combat
at the top of the key, officials with quick whistles slowing the game down to a
crawl, and cutters trying to avoid collisions. When you add all this up, it’s
not a shock as to why the visual of college basketball is so brutal these days.
“We are getting the game we deserve right now. College
basketball is antiquated in the way they do things.” Said Jay Bilas, ESPN
analyst and former Duke Blue Devil.
For the average fan, college hoops is boring to watch and
the NCAA is not willing to change many things up to improve the product on the
floor.
The NBA went through some changes to make the game more
visually appealing to their fans. The fans and even people inside the NBA made
complaints about how the game became ugly, so the NBA listened to them and over
the last 20 years of so, the NBA has been a leader in making their game better.
They have cracked down on hand-checking, flopping, backing players down in the
lane, and for those actions, it is why the NBA is more visually appealing to
fans now. It’s certainly more appealing to me.
The NCAA is suffering through a time where people are not
paying attention to college basketball like they used to. Overall attendance is
down, ratings are down, and scores are down. Teams are averaging about 67.2
points per game which is the lowest average total since 1952 which tells me
that college basketball players don’t have the offensive repertoire as they
once did. They are certainly more athletic, but that doesn’t mean they are
better overall players than their predecessors. Attendance is also down at
college basketball games. Overall attendance is down for the seventh straight
year and down roughly 360,000 people. In 2006 college basketball attendance
averaged 5,237 people and now it averages 4,817. That may not seem like a lot,
but to a school to lose roughly 500 paid people to a game means lost revenue
that is difficult to recover. What is driving these fans away? Are people being
turned off by one and done players? The drop in skilled players? Maybe. To go
along with the drop in attendance, the television ratings have also been declining.
ESPN which carries a ton of games has
had their viewing of college basketball drop by six percent in the last year.
Has conference realignment affected this? I would say yes because the new
conferences have taken away some very good rivalries which mean a lot to the
fans of those schools, but to presidents of those schools it’s all about the
money. Some type of change has to be made for college basketball to return to
what it once was and the NCAA has to spearhead that change.
What can be done though? It’s not like the NCAA is an
organization that likes to change things. It almost seems like the NCAA have to
be dragged kicking and screaming toward that change for it to actually occur.
The NCAA has changed the shot clock from 35 to 30 seconds to
help out scoring, but when there are a lack of shooters in college basketball
that point disappears. As I stated earlier, scoring is down to lowest levels in
about 50 years, so what other changes does the NCAA need to look at to increase
their ratings and slumping attendance?
Here are just a few ideas.
- Take away the possession arrow and replace it with the jump ball. I have hated this possession arrow rule since its inception, so I wouldn’t mind seeing it disappear.
- Move the three point line to the NBA distance which would open up the court for penetration.
- Get rid of the one-and-one free throw and make every foul the double bonus. This would eliminate the constant fouling at the end of many games.
- Make the 10 second backcourt time limit eight seconds.
- Put in the defensive three second rule.
Take those for whatever you want, but I think they would better
the college game. It would open things up, provide for more movement, and make
players play some better defense. No matter how much the NCAA likes to throw
out the student/athlete story line, the NCAA is a business and if the product
is inferior, the NCAA has to step in and improve it. I’m not saying that change
will come anytime soon, but it needs to happen otherwise people will continue
to walk away from college basketball.
Follow on Twitter: @pigskinopinion
