The University of North Carolina men's basketball team held aloft its sixth NCAA championship Monday. And if you didn't mind walking bleary-eyed into work Tuesday morning, you could have watched the occasion live.
Just days earlier, Mississippi State's women's basketball team pulled off one of the biggest upsets in sports history, beating a Connecticut team in the national semifinals that was riding a 111-game winning streak. And if you were cool with sitting in front of your television as the hands of your house clock sailed past midnight, you were able to see that monumental event.
What in the world sent those two games into the wee hours of the next morning? The tipoff times the night they began. Monday's UNC-Gonzaga game started at 9:20 p.m. Friday's UConn-Mississippi State game started at a staggering 10 p.m.
A national semifinal at 10 p.m.? Ludicrous. Huskies coach Geno Auriemma was on the bandwagon for that thought.
"Well, I've said this in the past: TV and what's going on in the actual arena don't go together," Auriemma said during the press conference the day before the Mississippi State game. "So what's best for television is a 10 o'clock start on the East Coast, or a 9:30 start on the East Coast.
"It's not best for my players to sit around till 9:30 tomorrow night, but it's best for TV because they're paying the bills. So they get to show the game whenever they feel like it."
Auriemma has a point. Who outside of the networks benefits from such a late tipoff? Do the players, who have their routines thrown into disarray? Does the regular viewer benefit from a game mostly played outside of prime-time hours? Does the young fan benefit when he or she has to stay up until midnight on a school night to watch the UNC-Gonzaga finish? Shouldn't the NCAA, in its attempts to grow the sport, at least try to start a major game like that at 8 p.m. at the latest?
I mean, the Super Bowl, the most-watched event every year, had a 6:30 p.m. kickoff, for crying out loud. And the NFL could start that game any time it chose. The NCAA can't bump its start times up at least an hour?
Yet viewers lose sleep and newspapers scramble to get in as much as they can of the game before their presses are forced to start rolling, because some network's research showed that post-9 p.m. tips are best.
Despite the grumbling, don't expect it to change anytime soon. Those numbers from the networks? They show viewers aren't fazed by staying up late.
Neilsen ratings had the UNC-Gonzaga game's viewership at 30 percent better than last year's UNC-Villanova thriller. An average of nearly 23 million people stayed up to watch. The UConn-Mississippi State game was watched by more than 2.7 million viewers. That was more than a half-million more than watched the Houston Rockets and Golden State Warriors on ESPN. The other national women's semifinal between South Carolina and Stanford, which started at 7:30 p.m., was watched by fewer than 1.5 million people.
So guys like me can keep complaining. Coaches like Auriemma can sit behind microphones and simmer. And the TV execs will just drop a copy of the ratings on the table and win the argument, because people are watching.
Heck, they might as well sell a few commercials for coffee while they're at it.
Contact Derek Redd at 304-348-1712 or derek.redd@wvgazettemail.com. Follow him on Twitter @derekredd.