If college basketball changes as much in the next 40 years as it did in the last 40 years, it’ll be (a) pretty much the same and (b) pretty much the same.
Depending on your view, the game is now blessed or cursed with the 3-point shot and the 30-second clock.
But 40 years ago, in the 1977-78 season, Arizona State averaged 82.7 points per game without the shot clock or 3-pointer. This year, the Sun Devils also averaged 82.7.
The game of ’78 was more of a race. Now it’s more like chess.
The biggest change in college basketball from 1978 to 2018 isn’t so much the style or quality of play. It’s that the people who work in and around the game make a lot more money. I mean, a Pac-12 referee now earns between $3,000 to $4,000 a game. A ref can work 80 games a year. Everybody gets paid except those who play.
Leading up to Monday’s championship game, the NCAA revealed it would generate about $870 million from basketball TV revenues. In 1978, the figure was $4.6 million a year. Average ticket for a 1978 NCAA Tournament game: $7.95. Today? Call the bank.
Over the last 40 years, the money gotten a lot better for coaches, refs, athletic directors and those who arrange a team’s charter flights.
The game has not matched its financial pace.
In 1978, Arizona played against more difficult competition than it did in 2018. The ’78 Wildcats played against future NBA standouts Joe Barry Carroll, David Greenwood, Kiki Vandeweghe, Michael Cooper, Reggie Theus, Tom Chambers and Danny Ainge. This year’s club played against Alabama’s Collin Sexton and, um, Stanford’s Reid Travis and some guy from Buffalo who looked a bit like an actor from Gilligan’s Island.
In 1978, a typical Arizona basketball game averaged about one hour and 45 minutes. This year? About 2 hours and 10 minutes.
Better? Worse? Forty years ago, UA fans were in pajamas for the 10 o’clock news.
This year, 17 Arizona games were televised by the Pac-12 Networks, which is available to roughly 35 percent of Tucson homes. Three games were streamed on ESPN3, which is watched by mini-audiences.
In ’78, every Arizona road game was televised live on Channel 11 in Tucson. Latest start? 7:30 p.m. Every home game was televised by Channel 11 on a delayed basis at 10:30 p.m.
Better? Worse? No mystery about starting times in ’78. No Bill Walton, either.
This year, Arizona flew a charter jet to all road games and stayed at 5-star hotels. Some of those trips began on a Tuesday afternoon and ended in the wee hours of a Sunday morning.
In ’78, Arizona played three WAC series on back-to-back, Friday/Saturday nights. School time missed? One day. The ’78 Wildcats flew in coach, lodged at the Holiday Inn in El Paso, the Ramada Inn in Laramie, Wyoming, and at the Travelodge in Salt Lake City. Rooms were, what, $39 a night?
Better? Worse? The Wildcats of ’78 were more student-athletes and less athlete-students.
This year, Arizona deployed players from the Bahamas, Serbia, Australia, Canada and New York.
In ’78, the Wildcats had already begun recruiting on a national scale. Their roster included players from Georgia, New York, Michigan, Illinois, Indiana and Texas.
Better? Worse? About the same; UA coach Fred Snowden long ago established that geography would not be an issue in recruiting.
This year, Arizona played in a league so substandard that it didn’t win an NCAA Tournament game, and only one team was seeded better than 11th.
In ’78, the old WAC was superior to the old Pac-8 and probably was better in the ’70s than the Pac-12 has been the last 10 years. Forty years ago, Cal and Stanford weren’t much better than intramural teams. Today it’s Cal and Washington State.
The most compelling story in Pac-12 basketball this season was Arizona State, which finished in eighth place.
People say the game has changed so thoroughly — it has become international in scope — that it bears little resemblance to the neighborhood-type basketball of the ’70s.
Mush.
In 1978, Arizona suited up 12 African-Americans on its 15-man roster. The game was fully integrated five or six years before that. The WAC’s best player of the 1970s was probably BYU’s Kresimir Cosic, who was from Yugoslovia. The Pac-12 hasn’t had a player as entertaining as Cosic since, what, OSU’s Gary Payton in 1990?
People say the game is vastly different because basketball players now leave for the NBA too soon.
That’s old news.
In 1971, I was the manager at Utah State, a school coming off an Elite Eight appearance against John Wooden and UCLA. Our best player, forward Nate Williams, left school a year early and entered what was then called the NBA’s “Hardship Draft.”
He was the No. 1 overall selection and played nine years in the NBA.
Three years later, Arizona sophomores Coniel Norman and Eric Money quit school and entered the NBA draft at a time entering the NBA draft was truly a risk. There were only 17 teams and 195 fewer roster spots than today.
In college basketball, the big difference of the last 40 years isn’t the 3-point shot or TV schedules that keep you up until midnight. It’s that more people are openly chasing the money now. Even the referees.
