About this time every year, one of the more annoying NBA writers puts together a blog entry titled something like “Sorry College Basketball Fans, This NBA Fan Still Hates March Madness” where they complain that college basketball players aren’t getting paid enough, aren’t athletic enough, and just miss too many f***in’ shots to be entertaining. The more freewheeling ones will even work in some rhetorical backflips about how fans are flat out racists if they follow college basketball instead of the NBA. I haven’t seen any such piece this year and rather have seen a few pieces on how “Sports Twitter” writ large is hitting a nadir. The linked New Yorker piece from Will Leitch asserts that following professional sports online is just not nearly as fun as it used to be. I know what he’s getting at, fake accounts are extremely annoying and spam is as bad as it’s ever been on twitter. I still found the piece hard to relate to, as I believe this has been among the funniest and most entertaining college basketball seasons I can remember.
The season has had moments like Jay Bilas suggesting court storming Wake Forest fans should have been jailed for making Kyle Filipowski fake an injury after Wake beat Duke. Basketball commentator Jeff Goodman made headlines when he threatened potential jail time to a DePaul superfan who made a controversial documentary on Providence Basketball, even asking the fan “How do you look in orange?” There had been enough absurd back and forth between teams that by January one CBB meme page had already put together a list of fanbases who could serve time in prison for what they’ve said to each other this season. Not only do college basketball fans seem to be having more fun online, but contrary to popular belief, TV ratings for the NCAA tournament have exceeded the NBA playoffs in recent years. Last year’s NCAA Final was the least watched in a half decade and still drew almost a million more fans than the most watched NBA finals game. 2023’s NBA playoffs were the most watched in five years, drawing an average of 5.5 million viewers per game where last year’s NCAA tourney averaged 9.9 million views per game. So, why are more people watching and more importantly having fun watching college basketball than the NBA?
It starts with how NBA fans and NCAA fans determine a successful season. There is an intense emphasis in NBA fandom on where each team and player stands in the scope of basketball history. Everyone is a bum when compared to the next guy up the totem pole. The league championship is the only thing an NBA team can win and they’re more there to be debated than celebrated. Fans seem to care less about how a championship was won than how it shapes the winner’s legacy. Meanwhile every year several NCAA teams go on emotionally arresting and legacy-defining runs that fans feed off of for years, and thanks to conference tournaments, teams also have multiple chances to do so. Had NC State lost the ACC Tournament last weekend, Kevin Keattes may have been packing his bags. After the Wolfpack’s miracle run to an ACC Title, he’ll be their coach till at least 2030 and will be remembered, at worst, as the school’s fourth best coach in history. Non-finals contending NBA teams have no comparable opportunities to give their fans that kind of emotional high.
Every college team and conference continues to feel like a niche, old school internet community in a way that is almost impossible for national professional leagues to replicate. Many of the major college programs have member paid message boards to discuss team news and rumors. A Tennessee football forum famously caught on to Michigan’s cheating scandal two years before anyone else did. NBA teams to my knowledge don’t have comparable spaces for their fans to congregate online. Even on Twitter, NCAA communities continue to feel small and tight knit in a way that is hard for an NBA team to replicate. NBA teams don’t have real conference rivals which for college fans creates an insular and adversarial atmosphere online. College fans get to know their conference rivals’ best players as well as their biggest bloggers and their more annoying burner accounts. Fan blogs and twitter accounts following NBA teams tend to play to the national media more than the local, which creates a fundamentally different kind of engagement. NBA teams also have fewer trophies to play for which gives fans less opportunities to get excited in a given season. I went to 2 time national champion Holy Cross, and the most excited I’ve ever been as a Crusader was when our basketball team went on a miracle run through the Patriot League Tournament in 2017, which led to our 15-17 Crusaders beating Southern University in a NCAA Tournament play-in game. A lot of NBA fans whose teams are below 500 end up checked out before the season even starts because they don’t have anything to be hopeful for. The most incisive writing I’ve read on the NBA this year is easily from the biggest Nets fan I know, my pseudonymous friend Ock Sportello. He spent his pre-season preview wondering why fans should care this year at all, asking himself questions like “what does it mean to associate yourself emotionally with a group of millionaires who do not know, beyond the point of the abstract, that you exist?” and “Where does one locate the capacity to imagine brighter days mere moments after the brightest days imploded?” and “How do I make meaning out of watching Ben Simmons?” Even DePaul fans didn’t sound that depressed this year after going winless in the Big East.
Thanks in part to pundits like Bill Simmons, many NBA fans and media personalities talk like GMs, seeing players as assets first and humans second. This rhetorical style is partially also due to the NBA’s draft and trading system where players have virtually zero control over where they play. I don’t think we talk enough about how crazy that is that a guy (say… Ben Simmons) might have to endure endless criticism by his own fans and has no real option to leave them for people who might appreciate him more. NCAA fans love their players for choosing their school over every other. If an NCAA player is getting roasted by his own fans every night, he has a God-given right to hightail it to the transfer portal and join a team that’ll appreciate them, as Caleb Love and many others did this off-season. Meanwhile ask Kevin Durant or LeBron how fans felt when they chose which NBA team they played for. College teams needing to recruit their players incentivizes every team to actually try and be competitive as well, because colleges can’t rely on the draft to bail them out. The vast majority of college programs are genuinely trying to at least win their conference in a given year, where it feels like half the NBA teams are really invested in the season they’re playing in.
You are also watching two fundamentally different groups of people play basketball between the two leagues. The best players in the NBA are among the most famous and rich people in the country and conduct themselves accordingly. As Tina Fey put it oh so well, “Authenticity is dangerous and expensive” and every rich person has learned that very lesson over the last decade. It cracked me up reading in the column I mentioned at the top that Leitch was upset Shaq was doing Pepsi commercials on his twitter instead of being whimsical now because like idk would we even believe that it was really Shaq himself if he was being whimsical on twitter these days? There is an economic incentive for rich people to keep their social media feeds clean, curated, and corporate. Meanwhile the NCAA Tournament features 18-24 year olds on national television for generally one of the first times in their life wearing their hearts on their sleeve for all to see. It’s not that “It just means more” to these kids, it’s just that they’re kids! They’re bright eyed and bushy tailed and have their entire lives in front of them. They haven’t been there before and they don’t know how to act so they tend to leave it all out on the court. Da’aron Fox famously cried after his Kentucky team lost to the eventual champions UNC in 2017 not because he thought that his basketball career was over, but because he knew he’d never be with that group of guys again. I am sure that he’d cry too if the Kings ever won a ring, but it’ll feel completely different to him than winning a championship with Kentucky would have felt because he is now a grown man and a millionaire.
Something people also seem to take for granted is that universities are intrinsically part of their community in a way that a professional sports team are not. A major university may administer degrees to tens of thousands of people a year, many of whom will be lifelong sports fans. Universities can often also be the largest employer in a region, particularly those with affiliate hospitals. Both students’ and employees’ friends and family will visit them on campus and share in the school’s reverie and grow to love the institution in some capacity. These universities still materially impact people’s lives in a way that creates a greater level of emotional investment. Believe it or not, many people’s lives have been made better from spending time at ECU and Appalachian State. You spend enough time in Greenville or Boone and you just might start to feel some way about the school in their town. Nobody’s life has been made better because of their association with the Charlotte Hornets and nothing about being in Charlotte will make you care about that team. I have my 3-5 main colleges I support but I also root for dozens of other schools because I had a friend who went there and loved it. I could not imagine rooting for a major American professional sports team for the same reason. And yes, college tuition prices these days are unconscionable and an outright scam but they at least (in theory) raise your earning potential via the degree they administer. Taxpayers don’t get a percentage of their pro sports team when they fund stadiums with their tax dollars.
All of this says nothing about the in game experience. Our guy Ock Sportello’s dispatch from a December Nets Pistons game at the Barclays Center is essential reading on what an NBA game is like as a fan of a fledgling team. Watching the worst college basketball game feels like a low cost act of charity. It’ll cost you fifteen dollars and you’ll feel like a genuine part of that school’s community for the afternoon. Meanwhile watching the worst NBA game feels like being nickeled and dimed on your way to the suicide booth. The best college basketball environments are among the best sports atmospheres you’ll find in the country, with dedicated student sections screaming and a band playing. Even at the best NBA game you might look around and wonder how many people are truly invested in the game on the court. Sometimes you don’t even realize the ball is in play because the NBA allows top 40 pop instrumentals to be played while the clock is running. Also, because college teams play about half as many games per regular season as NBA teams, they mean that much more mathematically as well. Every in conference game in college matters and nowadays every out of conference game matters too, where it doesn’t feel like every game in a given week matters for most NBA teams. That reality radiates through both players and fans.
Yes, college kids are still much worse basketball players than NBA players. They will miss more shots, they will have more stupid turnovers, they will make more mistakes. That, in my opinion, does not make their game any less entertaining. There is something for a fan of every college basketball team to care about every season and a bad team can become a good one in just a year or two. While the NBA may have the best athletes in the world, they’ll never be able to give all their fans a real sense of hope and local community the way that the NCAA can. That is what makes college basketball so fun.
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