KANSAS CITY, Mo. – To hear television analyst Billy Packer at the end of North Carolina’s victory over Duke two weeks ago, the mercury had blown through the thermometer.
“College basketball is on fire!” Packer screamed as the Tar Heels fans stormed the court.
Call it Disco Inferno on the eve of The Big Dance.
Another e-mail arrives from CBS. Ratings are through the roof. The Big Ten championship game was up 48 percent over last year.
Southeastern Conference title game up 30 percent.
Selection show up 14 percent.
Ratings soared that last weekend of the regular season, when Ohio State beat Illinois. Kansas’ victory at Kentucky in January matched the best regular-season rating since 1997.
College basketball is alive again, with all its vital signs looking good on the eve of the game’s three weekends of madness, the NCAA Tournament.
“There’s a lot of momentum heading into this tournament,” said Sean McManus, president of CBS Sports.
No doubt. Illinois’ quest for a perfect season, North Carolina’s continued resurgence under Roy Williams and the presence of traditional powers Duke, Kentucky and Kansas near the top of the polls have been good for business.
All the regional sites that aren’t in domes are advance sellouts, and most tickets were snapped up before the brackets were announced.
“That is unusual for all non-domes to be sold out early in the week,” said Bill Hancock, NCAA Tournament media coordinator.
Yep, college hoops is back. Except Oklahoma coach Kelvin Sampson was wondering, “I didn’t know it had gone anywhere.”
There’s a coach for you, focused on his team, oblivious to the world around him. But don’t blame Sampson. The Sooners were rolling a few years back with seven NCAA Tournament victories in a two-year span. He was a busy guy.
But the game’s image was reeling less than two years ago. Return to Oct. 15, 2003. The National Association of Basketball Coaches summoned all of its Division I members to a meeting in Chicago to discuss everything that had gone wrong with the sport, specifically the behavior of a few of their own.
Larry Eustachy’s partying, the academic fraud that brought down Jim Harrick at Georgia, the eligibility scandal that got Jan van Breda Kolff fired at St. Bonaventure, and the entire Baylor episode left the game in a state of shock entering that season. NCAA executive director Myles Brand called the coaches “bad actors.”
It wasn’t just the coaching. The teenagers-to-the-NBA movement seemed to be peaking. High school seniors, especially the centers, weren’t considering college. None of the underclassman on the consensus All-America first, second and third teams in 2003 returned in 2004.
World events also conspired against the game. The 2003 tournament opened the day bombs fell on Baghdad and the war with Iraq had started. CBS broadcast world events that day, while the games were dispatched to other networks.
But the game began its pivot the next season and continued into 2004-2005. And one of the big factors was the improved quality of play.
“What you’ve had was players coming back,” ESPN analyst Dick Vitale said. “The international players and high school kids started dominating the NBA draft, so more kids came back for college seasons, and that’s meant more high-quality teams than we’ve had in years.”
Players like Kansas’ Wayne Simien, North Carolina State’s Julius Hodge and Mississippi State’s Lawrence Roberts passed up the draft to return for senior seasons. All of their teams made the tournament. North Carolina’s three junior stars, Raymond Felton, Sean May and Rashad McCants, are collegians longer than many would have anticipated.
Perhaps the most significant return in the college ranks came from a coach. Duke’s Mike Krzyzewski passed on a $40 million offer to coach the Lakers.
“The (college) game is on an upward trend right now,” Krzyzewski said at the time.
And that was before the season started.
The Blue Devils came off the pace in the ACC to win the league tournament and become a No. 1 seed. Washington did the same thing in the Pacific-10 and emerged as one of the nation’s surprise teams.
And look who is starting to collect some hardware as the nation’s top player. Utah sophomore center Andrew Bogut, an Australian who could have been in the NBA this season. He will be next year, perhaps as the No. 1 selection.
The regular season provided exquisite drama. Both North Carolina-Duke games were decided in the final seconds. Kansas’ victory over Oklahoma State in Lawrence was remarkably well played. The Jayhawks’ loss at Texas Tech may have been the most intense game of the year.
Now comes the tournament and its weeks of dramatics. Count on the upsets, last-second shots, tears of joy and anguish. The next two days are some of the best on the sports calendar. There aren’t many days where a major sporting event begins on a weekday morning, as the NCAA Tournament does in three time zones.
Even Oklahoma’s Sampson has noticed something different in the air. With his Sooners playing their best ball toward the end of the year, Sampson started hearing about tournament projections. There had always been speculation.
“But it seemed like it got bigger this year,” Sampson said. “Maybe it’s because there’s more information outlets than ever before, but I kept hearing about “bracketology.’ I mean, what the heck is that?’
“It had everybody talking and everybody interested. It seems like it’s bigger now than it’s ever been.”
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