Is college basketball more compelling to watch than the NBA?

The NCAA Tournament puts college basketball in the spotlight from mid-March through early April, which can force the NBA to take a backseat during this period. Ardent supporters of the college game will use this window to extoll its virtues, and compare it to its professional counterpart. We’ll examine whether college basketball might actually be more appealing to get into than the NBA.

College basketball teams will play no more than 40 games per season, which puts added emphasis on each contest. Teams have a short amount of time to find a rhythm, and coaches need to learn what they have on the fly.

The NBA’s regular season schedule is 82 games, followed by a maximum of four seven-game playoff series. The New York Post wrote in 2023 that the NBA schedule is “full of passionless games”, and that the league has “wrecked” its regular season.

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Not all college basketball players end up playing the sport professionally. As Medium reported, the NCAA believes that 1% of all Division I athletes go pro—and that includes all sports. Oakland sharpshooter Jack Gohlke said to ESPN after his team’s win against Kentucky, “I know I’m not going to the NBA, but I know on any given night I can compete with those guys.”

For this reason, student-athletes lay their heart out on the line because most of them know that their final meaningful basketball games could be fast approaching.

In the NBA, it’s not uncommon for teams to rest star players with what can be best described as minimal ailments. In October 2023, ESPN detailed the NBA’s new policy on load management, which they felt was necessary to implement because of too many skipped games.

The NCAA tournament fosters maximum attention with its one-game, do or die postseason format. The best teams in the country can lose if they aren’t ready to play, and underdogs can spring to life with an inspired performance. Bleacher Report once called March Madness “the best time of year.”

As mentioned earlier, the NBA deploys series for its postseason. The positive slant for this is that the best, most deserving teams usually advance. The potential downside is that there isn’t much room for unpredictability, and the postseason takes two months to wrap up.

Despite the intensity of the college game, there are points in games where the skill level (or lack there of for certain players) tends to cause a lull in the action. The Detroit Free Press wrote in 2015 that the sport featured too many ugly shots and bad misses.

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On the other side of the ledger, CBS Sports makes a case that NBA players have never been more skilled. Frontcourt players are facilitating offense off the dribble, and it’s common for teams to run out lineups where all five players can shoot from three-point range.

The NBA has been put in a difficult position recently, as the Washington Post wondered whether the league’s scoring boom has gotten out of hand. It speaks to a question of whether players are less interested in playing defense, or whether the challenge of getting a bucket has been eliminated by the skyrocketing talent in the league today.

Historically, college basketball coaches have been huge stars. This makes sense considering that rosters traditionally roll over frequently. They’ll continue to change more quickly than usual, thanks to the transfer portal ingratiating itself in college basketball over the last few years. 24-7 Sports keeps track of the constant player movement.

On the professional level, the players tend to have all the power, and coaches are often scapegoated when teams don’t meet expectations. Los Angeles Clippers coach Tyronn Lue talked to Basketball Network about just how difficult it is for a coach to develop trust within a team.

For many decades, fans felt bad for college basketball players. They would give their heart and soul to the team, but not see a dime of profit that their schools or the NCAA would make off of their hard work. The Daily Mail and Washington Post talks about how name, image and likeness (NIL) rule changes have altered the perception of the NCAA tournament, as athletes can now earn money.

While the NCAA tournament can help put players, coaches and teams in the history books, it feels like NBA playoff games mean more to stars’ legacies. Yahoo Sports dove into the impact of Nikola Jokic and Jimmy Butler’s legacies during the 2023 NBA Finals, and those conversations tend to have more legs in the NBA than they do in college.

Let us know which brand of basketball you prefer in the comments section!

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