Friday, March 14, 1997 | 11:59 a.m.
ALL THE indicators say interest is down in NCAA basketball and the NCAA Tournament.
Regular-season attendance was off. TV ratings continue to decline. Just this week a prominent coach bemoaned the game's lack of star power. And empty seats have become increasingly prevalent even in tournament games.
The negatives leave a dreary impression, as if college basketball has had better days.
Maybe it's true, but you wouldn't know it in Las Vegas. At two of the larger casino sports books -- Caesars Palace in particular and the Las Vegas Hilton to a slightly lesser extent -- it took a longshoreman's resolve merely to catch a glimpse of first-round tournament games Thursday. Bettors and fans were shoulder to shoulder and surprisingly lively given the supposed state of the game.
At Caesars, the crowd backed into the casino area and strained to see the action on the big screens above. Lines at the betting windows were tangled and long, requiring a certain moxie just to persevere through the humanity.
At the more-spacious Hilton, there was room to breathe yet ideal viewing locations were at a premium. Boisterous patrons held all the good seats.
The first-day outlook: When it comes to the NCAA Tournament, the books are still doing a land-office business.
This in spite of TV and attendance numbers that speak otherwise.
Take the TV ratings numbers. For the past five years, ABC, CBS and ESPN have had a hand in broadcasting college basketball and in every case the numbers are down. Since the 1992-93 season, ABC is off by 29 percent, ESPN is off by 12 1/2 percent and CBS is off by 39 percent. (The national championship game, televised by CBS, also fell 20 percent between 1993 and '96.)
Even Sunday's CBS broadcast of the tournament pairings failed to equal the audience taking in an NBA game on NBC.
Attendance tells a tale of its own. Division-I attendance has dropped four of the past five years, and only two of the country's nine major conferences did not suffer through a decline this year. The Big Ten and Big 12 were up, but the ACC, the Atlantic 10, the Big East, Conference USA, the Pac 10, the SEC and the WAC were all down between 4.6 and 15.6 percent. (That's the WAC at 15.6, with its 10 pre-expansion teams down 5 percent and the league's six newcomers -- even including an improvement by UNLV -- experiencing an even greater overall decline.)
Outgoing LSU coach Dale Brown probably hit the nail on the head this week when he said interest in college basketball has decreased because of an "uneventful" season, plus the shortage of real strong teams and the inability of schools to attract and keep pro-level players before they prematurely jump to the NBA.
But if Brown were in Las Vegas today, he might do a double take as he looks around the sports book. The noise level ... the attention the games receive.
There's no evidence of that nationwide decline here.
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