The NCAA is a Big Deal
The National Collegiate Athletic Association or NCAA as it is known is the premier sports association in America for college students. It is basically a gateway to professional sports teams with many young people entering the big leagues from the college route. Many sports team scouts look out for the best and brightest from the NCAA in order to sign them on when they graduate. It has become one of the biggest sports talent producing institutes in the country.
The NCAA has many divisions and sports that it promotes in its roster, if anyone wants to find out about all the divisions in detail go to the NCAA’s Wikipedia page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ncaa. If I started to write them all out this article would be 40 pages long. It also seems that the different sports that are part of the NCAA have become very popular amongst sports fans in the US. Fans regularly attend sports tournaments and games at colleges and universities across the country in order to support their favourite college teams.
It is interesting that this is not even professional sport yet the attendance at some games is tremendous. What are the fascination people have with watching sports teams that are amateur to a certain extent and why would so many people support them. It would make more sense if the audience of the games were filled with the parents of the students or with past students attending and supporting their old universities, but the audiences are so large that this cannot be possible. It must be made up of random people as well who love college level sports.
A reason for this could be that it might be easier to get tickets to watch these games, because maybe ticket prices are less than professional games. Or maybe people think that the professional games have become too commercialised and the standard of sports at the NCAA level is still pure and competitive as it should be. I am not sure that people in the UK would line up and go crazy over university sports games. Although the rowing race between Oxford and Cambridge every year is mighty popular amongst people. It still isn’t at the crazy level of support that American people show the NCAA sports.
People from all walks of life come out in droves to watch games and support their favourite teams. Even games on television are so popular that the revenue generated by the NCAA from television contracts is the single biggest revenue stream that the association achieves. The association has contracts with all the large sports channels in America and earns some serious money because of this fact.
It seems that to the American people sports are such a big deal that they enjoy watching them at every level; their children’s sports games, at the school level, the college level and the professional level too. Close enough it seems the whole nation is sports crazy. The three big sports, Football, Basketball and Baseball have become a part of American culture and these are also the sports that are the most popular at the NCAA level. NCAA basketball is so popular that watching a college level game is now almost the same as watching a game being played in the NBA.
The format is almost exactly the same, the players all play to a very high level, there are cheerleaders, mascots, television crews and journalists all in attendance at the average NCAA basketball game. The teams that play in the NCAA are just as popular amongst fans as the professional teams in the NBA. It could be because so many professional athletes come from the NCAA level that fans are able to follow the progress of their careers from the college level to when they become pros and after that as well.
This level of connecting with a sports star at all levels of their career could be one of the reasons why the NCAA is so popular among fans of all ages. They feel they have watched this athlete grow and mature and it was because in part to the support they showed that he/she got to where they are today. The NCAA will continue to be the huge deal it is for many years to come and will continue to produce some of the greatest athletes that America and the world has ever seen.
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