More On The Business of College Sports

Charles Pierce looks at the massive changes taking place in college basketball:

Pitino saw the future of the whole game as a player at the University of Massachusetts when a gangly freshman named Julius Erving showed up at practice. He wasn't one of the legends who was already there. He wasn't Dean Smith or Lute Olson, or Denny Crum at Louisville. He was the next generation. In fact, he was part of the first Next Generation.
Pitino was there, coaching, in the late 1970s, when college basketball was first taking off, largely because ESPN was launched, and because CBS lost the NBA and needed some sort of basketball to fill in the time between the NFL and the PGA. The game peaked dramatically over the following two decades, helped in no small part by the advances in technology that made following the college ball, and concocting wagering pools on the NCAA tournament, easier for a mass audience. What used to be a vague cult on the fringes of the sports consciousness — I went to my first Final Four in 1973, and paid nine bucks for my ticket — exploded into a destination event.
Then, over the past several years, as the economy tumbled, and as the structure of college sports became as stable and reliable as an Italian government, the game lost some of its glow. Syracuse is leaving the Big East for the ACC and two big paydays a year with Duke and North Carolina. West Virginia's moving to the Big 12, and its fans surely must already be saving the egg money for those trips to Texas A&M and Oklahoma State. Nothing makes sense anymore.

I love the comment about the $9 Final Four ticket.  Television has warped college sports into a giant business in no way tied to higher education.  The massive amounts of money involved in the sport just make no sense.  The changes to the conferences and scheduling of games at all hours of the day, nearly every day of the week just bring that point home.