I'd like to apologize for the absence of my colleague, Michael Thomas Whalen Knapp, from these pages this week. He tells me he'll be back in full swing next edition, ready for another rhetorical beat-down courtesy of yours truly.
Before I get to the column, did you get a chance to see Sunday at Augusta? I thought there was no way that the final round of the Masters could have been as exciting as it was. I remember I told my friends that Tiger Woods, seven back to start the day, had no shot of making up that deficit, yet he and Phil Mickelson put on quite the show to charge up the leaderboard. Give credit to Kenny Perry, Angel Cabrera and Chad Campbell to stay focused enough to force a sudden-death playoff as the game's best breathed down their necks. That makes two majors for Cabrera in two years, both times with Woods in the field -- pretty impressive stuff.
For two major seasons, the NCAA has a marquee sport to market and present on television to a mass audience. In the fall there's the drama (and BCS-driven absurdity) of college football, while in the winter we get to witness the excitement of the spectacle of college basketball (by the way, who called the national title correctly? Oh right, Knapp, that was me).
But somehow, come springtime, there's no major draw on TV when it comes to college sports. Sure, there's the College World Series and some other coverage of various spring sport championships, but the fan does not get the same sort of regular-season, all-encompassing coverage afforded to football and basketball. Opportunity abounds.
If the NCAA wanted to focus on giving one spring sport the same degree of exposure as football and basketball, it should set its sights on lacrosse. I might be a bit biased here since I played lacrosse throughout my high school career, but beside that, I think there are some real benefits to showcasing what they call "the fastest game on two feet" on your television set.
To begin, lacrosse is one of the fastest-growing sports in America. Typically people associate lacrosse with being popular in the New York metropolitan area and Maryland. While this was certainly true in the 1990s, lacrosse has taken hold in places like Ohio, Texas, Colorado and California, and areas all over the nation are picking up the sport. Not only is there a sizable established market that would tune in to games, but having lacrosse on TV would help generate more excitement for the sport and help continue its growth beyond the East Coast.
Like football, clearly the most popular college sport, lacrosse is a highlight-reel sport that's pretty easy to follow, even for the uninitiated. It's a fast-paced game that requires its players to possess both speed and strength, and to play both offense and defense at the same time. Lacrosse has enticing one-on-one matchups, high goal scoring and lots of hitting. All of this means that there are plenty of moments that are fast, fun to watch and physically impressive for the audience to behold.
Lacrosse on television also has the potential to really take off, in part because it has a number of natural commercial breaks. Lacrosse is broken down into four quarters (two halves), and there are stoppages all the time for penalties and balls going out of play. Producers could add TV timeouts and their inclusion would not interfere with the flow of the game. This not only gives viewers a quick break from the game play (but not long enough to lose the viewer's interest), but also allows the networks showing the games to display more advertising, and generate more money.
Lastly, college lacrosse has the benefit of representing the highest level of competition for the spectator. I know there's the MLL, but that really isn't as popular among established lacrosse fans as is watching teams like University of Virginia, Duke, Syracuse and Maryland. Lacrosse fans, in a way, consider the college game to be the best brand of the game you can watch, so the NCAA would not have to fear people would opt to watch professional lacrosse if the body decided to give more expansive coverage to college lacrosse.
College baseball, on the other hand, has absolutely no way to compete with the MLB, which so thoroughly dominates the baseball preferences of Americans that it's insurmountable. One of my friends dug up some information that found that the Little League World Series got better ratings than the College World Series last year -- tough bucket. On the other hand, just under 50,000 fans showed up the 2008 lacrosse Final Four. You do the math.
