What Happened to College Basketball?

It’s been a while since college basketball was at the center of the sports conversation. Photo: John Biever /Sports Illustrated via Getty Images

Imagine if the fate of a Major League Baseball team was directly connected to an NFL team that played in the same city. In this scenario, if the New York Giants decided to move to Connecticut, the Yankees would have to as well. The arrangement would also affect which channel you watched Yankees games on, as well as the team’s budget and potentially even its slate of opponents. (Better hope the Patriots move to the same conference as the Giants, or … no more games against the Red Sox!) Does that sound like a good position for the Yankees, or Major League Baseball, moving forward? Does that sound like a league well-positioned to succeed long term, or one that has any real control over its future?

This is what it has felt like to love college basketball lately. In an age of constant realignment and dramatically shifting priorities for universities and television networks, the sport, whose new season begins on Monday, seems to be fading more in relevance by the year. Some of its wounds are self-inflicted; for instance, a massive amount of roster turnover makes it somewhat inhospitable to fans. But the most existential problem is the chaos going on in college football, which has scrambled the entire college-sports landscape, and not in a good way.

As NCAA executives and TV executives (it’s difficult to tell the two apart anymore) were shaking college football until every nickel fell out, it was telling how little regard they paid to anything else. Men’s and women’s basketball are generally the second- and third-highest revenue-producing college sports, but they’re so far behind football that they’re all but irrelevant in the eyes of executives. Of the top 50 revenue-producing college sports teams last year, only one — Duke men’s basketball, No. 48 — wasn’t a football team. (University of Illinois football, which this alum will tell you has been consistently both awful and unwatchable for nearly 40 years, brought in more revenue last year than every college basketball team in the country.) The executives made every decision with only one sport in mind. And that approach has left college basketball largely in tatters, trying to figure out how to put itself back together.

The geographic disparities caused by realignment have led to some strange conference matchups in college football — Illinois at Oregon, Stanford at Boston College, and so on. But at least those teams only play one game a week, and therefore have ample time to travel and prepare. In college basketball (and every other college sport, of course), there are multiple games a week; if you thought Rutgers-UCLA was bizarre, you’re going to be particularly confused by California-Clemson on a Tuesday night in February. More to the point: Student-athletes — almost all of whom are in college mostly to get a degree, not prepare for a professional sports career — are being dragged across the country in the middle of the school year for games that aren’t the high-profile television events networks pay top dollar for.

A relentless focus on the bottom line has forced college basketball to justify its existence to networks in ways that seem profoundly damaging to the sport. The one true money-maker in college basketball is the NCAA Tournament, a.k.a. March Madness, a.k.a. the thing everyone pays attention to even if they haven’t watched a game all year. The NCAA Tournament’s appeal has long been driven by underdogs and upsets; the primary appeals of the event are (a) its bracket and (b) the fact that a from-nowhere school like Fairleigh Dickinson or Northwestern State can have a moment on the national stage. The new world, where television ratings are the only thing that matters, may well screw with both. The super conferences that have emerged amid the great college-athletic realignment have begun pressuring the NCAA not just to expand the tournament to 96 teams — to provide more television inventory, of course — but also to focus on more bids for the larger leagues rather than the smaller ones, in an effort to promote bigger brand names. (The current fight about the NIT, the consolation tournament, is largely over that issue.) These are self-serving moves meant only to juice the supposedly all-important ratings.

The cost could be the soul of the tournament itself. TV executives don’t care about college basketball’s long-term health — they’re just trying to get it to pull its weight financially in a system that’s rigged against everyone except football. But because the sport is at such a weak point, there is no one in a position of power to fight the vultures off.

And make no mistake, it is at a weak point. The average sports fan has become more and more focused on the NBA and often pays attention to college basketball only to keep up with future draft picks. But ESPN projects that only one of the top four prospects in the upcoming NBA draft will even be playing college basketball this year, despite the one-and-done rule meant to push more players into the college game. Then there’s the style of the college game, which has become more and more distant from that of the NBA. As the NBA has moved away from traditional big men, those big men are staying in college basketball and dominating, but making the game look even more drastically different than the pros. Only a single player on the preseason All-American team — Duke’s Kyle Filipowski — is projected to be a first-round pick. The one thing that was supposed to boost college sports was Bronny James, LeBron’s son and a highly regarded NBA prospect, playing for USC. But his heart ailment could keep him off the team all season; he still hasn’t been able to practice. It is very possible your most hard-core NBA fan friend could not name a single college-basketball player this year. That’s not good.

The decline in visibility of the men’s game is happening just as women’s college basketball is having a peak cultural moment, thanks to the kind of high-profile personalities that are nowhere to be found on the men’s side. Iowa’s Caitlin Clark had her full-on crossover moment in last year’s Final Four, helping lead the sport to unparalleled heights, even nearly passing the television ratings of the men’s tournament. But she’s hardly the big name in women’s hoops: LSU’s Angel Reese (who had a fun, spicy moment with Clark in the title game last year, the kind of thing men’s hoops was also lacking) has the potential to be even bigger than Clark, and that’s not even accounting for the big-name coaches in the sport, from South Carolina’s Dawn Staley to LSU’s Kim Mulkey to even the sports’ ultimate villain, Connecticut’s Geno Auriemma. And those players, along with Connecticut’s Paige Bueckers and Stanford’s Cameron Brink, will head straight into the WNBA already famous and beloved by millions of fans. This is what the men’s game used to be like.

Not that any of this will prevent Caitlin Clark or any other college-basketball player from having to trek to the other side of the country on a Tuesday night in the middle of the school year simply because television executives wanted the same system for football. And that’s the issue with college basketball: It has no control over itself. It has to do what football tells it to. I say all this with sorrow. I love college basketball: You are reading someone who spent his Sunday night screaming at his television during an exhibition college-basketball game. I am a loyal fan of this sport who will watch no matter what. But there aren’t that many of me left. For now, I’m just trying to enjoy a sport I love while I still can. But if the sport keeps having to suffer for college football’s sins, I might be alone pretty soon.