Absence makes the heart grow fonder

I used to be one of those fans who religiously filled out my bracket for the NCAA tournament and would watch wall-to-wall on the first weekend of the tournament and then jones for the return of Thursday and Friday the following week for play to resume.

But nowadays, I simply don’t care.

But last Thursday and Friday I turned on the tournament, just for background noise and I quickly found myself engrossed in the No. 8 Ohio State vs No. 9 TCU game.

And then it dawned on me: I was into the game because there was an actual flow to it. Both teams running up and down the court, clock running and the game actually being, you know, played. Those teams played nearly non-stop for three minutes of actual game time.

It was entertaining. There was no time for me to change the channel during a break in the action because there were no breaks, other than a ball going out of bounds, but the game was quickly restarted.

Now compare that to the NBA. If I don’t watch college hoops, I might watch even less NBA basketball. Other than the Warriors, I don’t watch the NBA — and my interest in the G-League Warriors is starting to wane, as well.

Why? Because it is so boring. I was watching a Warriors game a couple weeks ago and I started timing things. I came to the realization that NBA games can’t go more than 30 seconds without some kind of stoppage: a foul, free throws, a timeout, a review of a play, a commercial. Just no actual playing, most of the time players simply milling about.

Those same three minutes of college game play would take about 15 minutes of NBA time. I once timed my drive home by listening to the fourth quarter of a Warriors game a few years ago. The fourth quarter was just starting and I was 45 minutes from home.

The game ended as I got off the freeway 40 minutes later. You can watch an entire half of college basketball in that same amount of time.

I think what turned me off to the college game all those years ago was the fact there were so many one-and-done players, you couldn’t learn to like a player and team because he was here one day and gone the next.

But maybe I need to look at from an entertainment lens and right now, college basketball is infinitely more entertaining than the NBA.

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And the lack of NBA entertainment is why it is dying a slow death. Even that sport most people associate with boring and slow — baseball — is overtaking the NBA.

The World Series has outdrawn NBA Finals TV viewers four times in the last six years. Last year’s Dodgers-Blue Jays World Series out-drew the Thunder-Pacers NBA Finals by nearly 5%.

That’s not nothing.

I credit the changes MLB has implemented for making the game more entertaining. I know baseball purists will hate this, but the MLB pitch clock has been a godsend, as has a runner starting at second in extra inning games.

Baseball games used to last three-plus hours. The changes have dropped those times by more than 30 minutes.

There is simply no need for a batter to step out of the box and readjust everything on his body — when he didn’t even swing. There is no reason for a pitcher to go on a walk-about behind the mound between pitches. And there is certainly no reason to have five to seven minutes of television commercials.

MLB realized it was losing the younger generation because of the time it took to play games and it made changes. The NBA should take some notes from MLB.

There is a reason European soccer has gotten so big in the United States — you can watch world-class teams play each other and be done in two hours.

Nathan Mollat has been covering high school sports in San Mateo County for the San Mateo Daily Journal since 2001. He can be reached by email: nathan@smdailyjournal.com.