Baskeball-a-Thon

All over the map baby!

If you turned on ESPN at any time on Tuesday you saw college basketball. And when I say any time, I mean any time. From the time the Cal St. Fullerton/UCLA game started at 12am on Tuesday to the end of the TCU/Arizona St. game at 130am on Wednesday there was continuous basketball on ESPN (and some games on ESPN2). Some of the games were crap, such as the Monmouth/St. Peter's game, but at least half of the games were wildly entertaining. Gonzaga gave #2 Michigan St. a hell of a game in the Izzone, Temple should have knocked off Georgetown in DC, and Memphis was a buzzer-beater away from knocking off #1 Kansas on a neutral court.

Naturally the premier match-ups were primetime games and the small-school games were on during the wee hours of the morning, but the idea in general is very intriguing. Before Monday night I could not have cares less about the upcoming college basketball season, because Pitt is not a top-level team this year and I am at Drexel (no offense). But the second-annual college basketball marathon got me pumped up. There were so many entertaining games and even the games that featured #1 and #2 vs. unranked teams went right down to the wire. Kansas, Michigan St. and Kentucky all played unranked teams the last few days, going 3-0 but only winning by a combined 8 points. Maybe that means that the unranked teams they were playing were better than expected, or maybe the top-tier teams are worse than we thought.

I love the idea of this marathon and I think there should be one of these days every month, instead of every year. An ESPN channel that just has continuous basketball, 24/7, from mid-November until conference tournaments would be incredible. Of course that would entail ESPN hiring about 40 more broadcasters and hundreds of crew workers, but it would be revolutionary for sports television and I am sure it would be popular with current sports fans and ESPN followers. It is a distant wish, I guess, because it will never happen; but could you imagine?