“Rivalry Week” Is Now Crap. It Used To Be “Rivalry Season”

We rarely do editorials during the season, but I think this is the appropriate time to offer up the following….

This is the week that ESPN has dubbed “Rivalry Week.”  It’s an entire week that’s basically built around the Duke v North Carolina game, along with some other rivalries that are on the bill, but not as the headliner.  It actually wasn’t a bad idea at first.  A week where many of the biggest conference rivals faced off against each other.  But, we went from having big conference rivals to supposed conference rivals, and then from that we went to match ups that weren’t even conference rivals.  One year we had Xavier playing Georgia as part of Rivalry Week, and they actually ran a promo mentioning the rivalry that existed between the two.  Huh??

We here at Hoops HD still laugh about that.

So, with so many conferences being carved up with realignment, many of the rivalries have been carved up as well.  We used to have so many rivalries that you couldn’t possibly fit them all into one week.  Now we have so few that we have to pretend that some of the games are rivalry games when in reality they are not.  Like…Kansas v West Virginia for instance, or Lousville v Syracuse.  At best those are just regular conference games.

I complain about how I miss the Border War between Kansas and Missouri, and I do, but as I’m sure most of the people who regularly follow us have figured out, me complaining about it is strictly hyperbole for the sake of amusement.  I do miss rivalries in general, though.  Rivalries are what fueled college athletics, and college basketball in particular.  It wasn’t that long ago when the majority of conferences were single divisions consisting pretty much entirely of traditional and regional rivals, and that played balanced double round robin schedules.  It was great.  We didn’t have “Rivalry Week,” we had “Rivalry Season.”  The Big Eight/Big Twelve used to consist of Kansas, Missouri, Kansas State, Nebraska, Colorado, Oklahoma, Oklahoma State and Iowa State.  Nearly every match up featured two teams that hated each other.  The Big East had Boston College, UConn, Syracuse, Georgetown, Saint John’s, Pitt and West Virginia.  Even Seton Hall and Rutgers had some heat between them.  The ACC, in its classic nine team format, featured a rivalry game in just about every single conference game.  The vast majority of that is gone now.

I’m about to say something that to me seems rather obvious, but at the same time seems to be understood by very few people, particularly diehard fans and athletic administrators.  Ninety percent of college basketball fans are casual fans.  They get excited when their team is doing well, and they love being a part of the atmosphere, but it isn’t the most critical element of their lives.  They don’t care about fancy ribbon boards and video screens that tell us how many assists each player has.  Many of them would probably need it explained to them how a player is even credited with an assist.  Casual fans are excited by big rivalry games, and when those are cut out the way they have been, the casual fans are somewhat alienated.  Try convincing a casual Georgetown fan that playing against Xavier and Butler is a bigger deal than playing against Syracuse or UConn.  Try convincing a Missouri fan that playing against Vanderbilt and Georgia is a bigger deal than playing against Kansas or Nebraska.  Try convincing casual West Virginia fans that games against Oklahoma and TCU are a bigger deal than games against Pitt or Louisville.  You can’t.

So, with that in mind, has anyone else noticed a decline in attendance since we had all this realignment??  They jack up prices, they cut out rivalries, and strangely enough, attendance has dipped.  I wonder why??

NCAA Athletics is the only sports organization in the world that collectively avoids the rivalries rather than embraces them.  I’m not a huge NFL, NBA or MLB guy, but one of the things all three of those leagues understand is that rivalries are important, and to have the rivalry teams in the same divisions is important.  If the Yankees and Red Sox were college programs instead of MLB franchises, chances are they’d switch conferences and then not even play each other in an out of conference game while insisting they had nothing to gain by doing so.  It makes sense to have the Browns, Bengals, Steelers and Ravens all in the same division.  But, if those were colleges, they’d all try and get away from each other and insist they had nothing to gain by playing each other.  You gotta wonder what the NCAA would look like if the NFL or NBA was in charge of aligning the conferences and setting the schedules.  It would probably look a lot different, and it would probably be for the better.

I still love college basketball.  It is still my favorite sport.  But, it’s not as exciting as it used to be throughout the course of the entire season.  It’s not even close.  TV ratings and attendance seem to reflect that.  In fact, I think there is a much stronger sense of rivalry and true conference identity in the so-called Under the Radar conferences than in the power conferences.  I was watching Manhattan v Iona the other night, and it dawned on me that there aren’t many power conference rivalries like that one any more.  Same with the MAC and NEC leagues, where every game features some bitterness.  The best fan experience and exciting brand of ball may actually now lie in the non-major conferences.

Below is an incomplete list that I began about a year ago.  I’ll eventually go through all 351 teams and finish it some day, but have yet to do so.  My apologies to the UTR schools that have not been included yet.  The goal is 40 conferences, all of which are single division leagues featuring between eight and ten teams.  You can say a lot of things about this, but one thing that cannot be denied is that fan interest would go through the roof if something were done to force the NCAA to align all the conferences this way (or in some sort of similar fashion).

1. Florida, Florida State, Miami FL, Georgia, Georgia Tech, Clemson, South Carolina, UCF, USF (9)

2. Virginia, Virginia Tech, West Virginia, Pitt, Maryland, UNC, Duke, Wake, NC State, Penn State (10)

3. UMass, UConn, Boston College, Providence, Rhode Island, Temple, Villanova, Syracuse, Georgetown (9)

4. Wazzu, Washington, Oregon State, Oregon, Stanford, Cal, UCLA, USC, San Diego State, Gonzaga (10)

5. Louisville, Kentucky, Memphis, Vandy, Tennessee, Ole Miss, Mississippi State, Auburn, Alabama (9)

6. Indiana, Purdue, Illinois, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Michigan, Michigan State, Ohio State (8)

7. Iowa, Iowa State, Kansas State, Kansas, Missouri, Nebraska, Colorado, Colorado State, Wyoming, Air Force (10)

8. Texas, Texas A&M, Texas Tech, Baylor, Oklahoma, Oklahoma State, LSU, Arkansas, Tulsa (9)

9. Xavier, Dayton, Butler, Saint Louis, Marquette, DePaul, Notre Dame, Cincinnati, Northwestern (9)

10. Ohio, Miami OH, Bowling Green, Toledo, Kent State, Akron, Wright State, Cleveland State, Youngstown State (9)

11. BYU, Utah, Utah State, New Mexico, New Mexico State, UNLV, Nevada, Arizona, Arizona State (9)

12. Eastern Michigan, Central Michigan, Western Michigan, Detroit, Oakland, IPFW, IUPUI, Ball State, Northern Kentucky (9)

13. UTEP, TCU, SMU, Rice, Houston, UTSA, Arlington, Louisiana Tech, Louisiana Monroe, Louisiana Lafayette (10)

14. VCU, Richmond, Old Dominion, Saint Joe’s, La Salle, Drexel, Saint John’s, Seton Hall, Rutgers, (9)

15. Vermont, Hartford, Quinnipiac, Boston U, Northeastern, Central Connecticut, Sacred Heart, New Hampshire (8)

16. Towson, Duquesne, Saint Bonaventure, George Mason, George Washington, UNC Wilmington, Hofstra, Delaware (8)

17. Boise State, Idaho, Denver, Northern Colorado, Montana, Montana State, North Dakota, North Dakota State, South Dakota, South Dakota State (10)