So you call yourself a college basketball fan? Now that you’ve filled out your brackets, ask yourself this question: how many college basketball games have you watched this year on TV? How many have you seen in person?
For an increasing number of Americans, the answer is none, or in most cases, not many. And if you’re looking for a reason why the first four months of the college roundball season are received with such indifference, consider two words: March Madness.
The National Collegiate Athletic Association’s men’s basketball tournament is the biggest, baddest, most spectacular playoff in American sports. Really, nothing else comes close: 68 teams from schools all over the nation – big powers, small powers, teams from schools you never heard – all duking it out on the hardwood.
The tournament is the NCAA’s cash cow and its principal means of holding together so many schools under its banner. It’s incredibly popular: last year over 350 million people checked in on the tournament on social media.
In workplaces all over the country, people who haven’t watched a college basketball game all year find themselves filling out brackets predicting the winners, even though the odds of a perfect bracket are estimated to be anywhere from 1 in 4.3bn to 1 in 9.2 quintillon. Billionaire Warren Buffett offered the prize of $1m to be paid out annually for life to any of his Berkshire Hathaway employees just for picking a perfect Sweet 16.
And that’s a problem: Most March Madness watchers haven’t watched a college basketball game all season, either on TV or in person. As the tournament has grown in the public consciousness, fewer and fewer people are paying attention to the rest of the season – diminishing the importance of college basketball itself.
This was first noted several years ago. As Paulsen SMW wrote in the Sporting News on 30 March 2015, as the tournament has increased in popularity, “the same cannot be said for the regular season. The overwhelming majority of college basketball regular-season games barely registered in the ratings. Few other sports have such a discrepancy between the regular and postseasons. Regular season games averaged approximately 434,000 viewers across ESPN, ESPN2, ESPNU, ESPNEWS, NBCSN, FS1, FS2, FOX and CBS – a fraction of the 9.9 million for the tournament to date.”
Ratings for the 2015-16 regular season confirmed the trend. “College basketball viewership was down during the regular season across most networks,” according to Austin Karp in Sports Business Daily. “Part of the decline can be attributed to a constant shuffle of the men’s top 10, while record figures for presidential debates on cable TV also had an impact. However, the trend for regular-season college hoops viewership has been going down for years now for several networks.”
No matter how you look at the numbers, regular-season college basketball is declining in popularity, not only in TV viewers but ticket sales. The NCAA grudgingly admits that attendance at regular season games dipped for the eighth straight year.
There are nearly as many theories about why ratings and ticket sales are declining as there are commentators. The expansion of NBA teams to areas that were once bastions of college basketball, the continuing recession and lack of disposable income for college students, and increased competition from other professional sports during the college season are likely factors. To say nothing of increased ticket prices. Last year, the highest average home game ticket for the Duke Blue Devils was $198.02 and a ticket for the second games between Duke and arch-rival North Carolina went for over $1,500. At those prices you’d have to be in the 1% to take your family.
But Charles Barkley lays the blame directly on the NCAA tournament: “A lot of fans just have the feeling: ‘Who cares what happens during the regular season when all that matters is what happens in the tournament?’ It’s bad for a game that used to be built on rivalries that went back decades, that were important to fans whether or not they had anything to do with deciding the national championship. It’s like the season doesn’t matter anymore except for deciding who gets what seed.”
Barkley’s on to something. But even if we knew for sure that March Madness is draining viewership away from the rest of the season, it’s unlikely that college basketball’s powers that be would do much about it. The tournament accounts for more than 90% of the NCAA’s revenue, and individual colleges benefit from it financially as well.
The numbers are staggering. In 2010 the NCAA inked a 14-year deal with CBS and Turner Broadcasting for $10.8bn to broadcast the tournament. In 2015 ad revenue alone was estimated a $1.1bn.
The participating schools also gain big through a complicated system of “units” paid to all conferences. In 2015 about $205mi was divvied up, with the big schools raking in huge payoffs (the Kentucky Wildcats earned $8.2m when they made it to the Final Four) and even the smaller conferences whose schools generally don’t make it past the round can receive a check for a couple of million.
How did the NCAA become the caretaker of this massive infusion of cash?
The current state of affairs was solidified when the NCAA bought out the only remaining competition to March Madness, the National Invitational Tournament. The NIT was born a year earlier than the NCAA, in 1930, and for decades held a significant advantage over the younger tourney: the NIT could offer schools from all over the country a trip to New York and exposure from the nation’s media center.
The NIT was weakened, though, by the 1951 betting scandal in which numerous players were found to have taken money for shaving points or even, in a few examples, having thrown games altogether. The scandal allowed the NCAA – which vowed to “clean up” college basketball, a boast it has never lived up to – to more or less pull even in stature with the NIT. Until the 1980s, the two organizations constantly quarreled, with the NCAA pressuring its conference winners to appear only in their tournament.
In 1985, though, the NCAA came into the dominant position by raising the number of participant schools to 64 (now 68) and corralling enough money in the national TV contracts to pay everyone. That was the birth of “bracketology” as we know it today.
In 2005 the NCAA ended the rivalry by purchasing the rights to the NIT for more than $56m, continuing the lesser tournament and ensuring an additional 32 colleges and their conferences a fat paycheck every spring.
What no one has yet been able to calculate is whether or not those checks will make up for lost revenues as overall interest in college basketball declines.
So, yes, the Division I men’s basketball tournament has done well for the NCAA. Whether it has done well by the game is more doubtful.
