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   College baseball

Why isn’t college baseball more popular?

We love college sports. We love baseball. So why don’t we love college baseball?

Watching some of the Super Regional round of the college baseball playoffs I was reminded again how much I enjoy it.

I far prefer the college game to the pro game. The strike zone is called big, like it’s supposed to be; the pitchers work faster, there’s more running, the players aren’t all hopped up on HGH, testosterone and Viagra and there’s lots of scoring without lots of home runs.

The sport is dominated by big BCS conference teams with huge fan bases like Miami, LSU, Arizona State and Texas and it runs largely unopposed on the college athletics calendar.

The “ping” is hard to get used, but on balance, it’s an exciting game.

Despite that, college baseball is virtually invisible to our sporting radar screen.

It doesn’t help that half of the top high school players go directly to professional baseball, but you don’t miss what you never had so that excuse doesn’t hold up.

The only reason I could come up with is Eastern media bias.

Look at college baseball’s Top-25. It’s largely ACC, SEC, Pac-10 teams. You don’t see Syracuse. You don’t see Penn State. You don’t see Providence or Rutgers or Notre Dame or the other schools popular with the huge eastern media centers of New York, Boston, D.C. and Philadelphia.

We are all products of our environment and with no college baseball presence in the Northeast where most of our general and sports media comes from, college baseball gets forgotten.

This is why college football was underserved nationally by the sports media for so long.

I worked at ESPN in Bristol, CT. I know how it works. From the on-air hosts and anchors to the producers to management, despite the international presence of that company and its mission statement to be “The Worldwide Leader in Sports,” it’s still a company that largely features an employee base drawn from the Northeast.

Driving through the parking lot at ESPN, there were always more Syracuse, Brown, Fordam, SUNY-wherever bumper stickers than there those from the SEC, ACC or Pac-10 schools.

For better or worse – probably worse – ESPN determines not only what sports information we get, but what sports do and don’t get attention and those programming decisions are made by people with natural biases toward what they grew up with and around and against what they didn’t.

What does college football mean to a guy who grew up in Massachusetts or went to college at SUNY-Binghamton?

Nothing.

I worked with Tony Kornheiser while I was at ESPN. He grew up on Long Island, went to school at Binghampton, worked in Manhattan, then went to Washington, D.C.

What would he know about college football?

Nothing, and he readily admitted that.

Never in his life had he been presented with the color, the noise, the passion, the drama of a college football Saturday in Athens or Auburn or Baton Rouge or Columbus. How could he possibly know what he was missing?

Tony’s experience wasn’t unusual for ESPN employees of all levels. College football had no presence in the Northeast, ESPN employees didn’t grow up with it, so it wasn’t in their consciousness and it was neglected by the network.

Some new blood finally came to ESPN in the last few years from outside the Northeast to turn people on the excitement, rivalries and spectacle of college football and the ratings went up and up so it finally broke down the walls and now gets the sort of coverage it deserves, but it took a long time for it to get attention.

Same thing with NASCAR which ESPN was 10 years behind on.

Same thing with college baseball.

Of everything I did in four years at ESPN, helping bring attention to the wonder of college football and raising its profile within the company is my greatest and proudest achievement.

ESPN is a terribly biased company when it comes to what it covers and what it doesn’t, but that bias isn’t mean-spirited or purposeful, it’s the natural byproduct of where the lion’s share of its employees were born, grew up and went to college.

Bias, by the way, works in both directions. It not only influences what isn’t covered, it influences what is covered. ESPN kept hockey on life-support long after the general public tuned it out because so many ESPN employees were Whalers, Bruins, Rangers, Islanders, Sabers and Flyers fans. Within the halls of ESPN, hockey is still a major topic of conversation even though it’s dead to the rest of the nation.

To this day, even without the games airing on ESPN, the network still gives the NHL far more coverage than its popularity merits.

So college baseball is on the outside looking in.

What it does have in its favor is more and more outlets devoted to sports and college sports specifically and a breaking down of the protective walls that for so long made this an NFL, NBA, MLB, NHL, college football and basketball country.

You’ve seen some huge shifts in popularity and attention in the last 15 years with fans and media coming and going to sports with greater mobility.

The explosive growth of the NFL and college football, NASCAR’s ascension, the decline of baseball and college basketball, the death of boxing, the rise of MMA – the sporting landscape is much different than it was even in the early 90s.

No longer do we as fans – or is the media – entrenched in what we follow. If something’s hot, we go to it. If it’s not, we leave it. That’s a good thing because it means we have options and it forces the sports to operate to best serve what we want and not take our support for granted.

Here’s hoping college baseball can catch that wave because the more I watch it, the more I enjoy it, and with all the crap that fills up our sports channels – poker, drag racing, dog shows – there’s certainly room.