Running 2022-23 NCAA Basketball Thread

I'm glad women's hoops is increasing in popularity, but I don't think a comparison of a regional final to regular-season games is terribly useful. And that's from a guy who was in the building for the atrocity that was last night's Wiz-Celtics game.

 

The College World Series will probably get better ratings than almost all of ESPN's Sunday Night Baseball MLB broadcasts. People are attracted to contests with high stakes. There aren't many contests at the pro sports level with lower stakes than a random NBA regular season game.

 

That's the indictment. The NBA is a $5 billion dollar a year product with some of the most recognizable athletes on the planet. A frigging women's regional final beat it. I can't think of a bigger indictment of the league.

 

My money is on McCasland. He's got experience in recruiting the area. I think May stays one more year. He's got his team coming back if he can hold them together, they're moving up to the AAC, and the open jobs don't seem to be a good fit for him. Penn State might work, but I don't think he wants to try to make that heavy a lift. That looks entirely too much like "Hot young coach cashes in at a P5 that's a perpetual bottom half dweller, takes the money, then his career slides backward when he gets canned for having the same sort of record the coaches before him did."

 

It would be an indictment if NBA ratings fell of a cliff (which I don't know happened).

What DID happen is that viewership of the women's regional final gained 1.21 million viewers from a comparable regional final a year ago. And it's not a one-off. The Ohio State-UConn regional final had the same rating as Iowa-Louisville and 2.41 million viewers (vs. 2.50 for Iowa-Louisville).

Where did those extra viewers come from is the story.

 

In one year? An 82% increase in viewers? Are they not betting on NBA games?

 

Penn State has its coach, Rhoades from VCU.

 

Odom was making $800K at Utah State. I'm guessing VCU would go to at least $1.5M to lure Odom back east.

 

Makes you wonder why Penn State isn’t cutting out the middleman and talking to Odom. Rhodes has been … fine, but VCU isn’t the holy terror it was a decade ago.

 

One more reason for me to think that May stays at FAU. We'll see.