Well, this article would suggest it's an important piece of the puzzle.

Virginia-Duke averages 3.7 million viewers

Quote:Saturday’s top-5 matchup between then-No. 4 Virginia and No. 1 Duke delivered a Nielsen reported audience of 3,764,000 viewers, making it the most-watched college basketball game across all networks this season. The audience peaked at 4,980,000 viewers in the telecast’s final minutes of the game.

Season-to-date, men’s college basketball on ESPN and ESPN2 is up eight percent. ESPN networks have aired the 44 most-viewed games on cable, including seven of the top 10 across all networks.

For one, I'm sure Saturday games get better ratings than midweek games and I would also suggest ESPN has become better at marketing their product.

My point here is more of a broad one...ESPN gets a lot of value based on the amount of money they spend on this sport.

They can put at least a couple of games on every night and fill air time with watchable content. They can feature the biggest match-ups on the weekend and play them up all week the same way they market football games.

It's true that the typical college basketball program doesn't generate that much money and I'm not sure any of them generate as much as their football counterparts. Nonetheless, when you consider that networks are basically buying football content when they sign a contract with a conference, it's interesting to note they're getting a lot of basketball games thrown in.

In the event that Alston goes a certain way and if that subsequently causes major conferences to pull out of the NCAA Tournament and create their own then I predict ESPN is going to have to drop more money on basketball because the leagues will have figured out that it's more valuable to the networks than they've been letting on.