The measurable impact comes mostly from national exposure, but it’s difficult to quantify the impact of, say, the Spiders championship run two years ago. In other words, if it’s not a bowl game or the NCAA tournament, your school doesn’t make ESPN’s highlight reel.
Norwood Teague, director of athletics at Virginia Commonwealth University, knows this all too well. This year’s men’s basketball team didn’t make the NCAA or the National Invitational Tournament, both nationally televised basketball post-season contests, and the team was forced to settle for the much more obscure College Basketball Invitational. The team began play in the championship title series Monday — best two out of three — against St. Louis University, but almost no one outside the Siegel Center has a clue VCU’s still playing.
That wasn’t the case three years ago, when Eric Mayor nailed a 17-foot jumper with 1.8 seconds left to beat Duke University in the first round of the NCAA tournament, the granddaddy of collegiate sporting events. The shot became an iconic symbol of VCU basketball.
“When we beat Duke, we tried to calculate what kind of marketing that did for the school. It went on and on and on,†he says. “We were on national TV for 11 minutes. Every CBS [station] in the country was on us for 11 minutes. The spikes on our university Web sites were off the charts.â€
The success of the basketball team has helped renew rumblings about VCU football, something of an urban legend (see sidebar), but football represents an entirely different kind of marketing, Teague says. “It’s hard to beat what we did with men’s basketball,†he says. “The thing that [football] would do is it would provide a real rallying point for alums and fans.â€
