Because of the geography of Division I college basketball, more than 80 percent of all programs are east of the Rocky Mountains.
What does that mean for you, the viewer? If you’re like me (i.e. an addict constantly striving for his next basketball fix), you spend the first primetime hours each evening ping-ponging back and forth from marquee games up and down the east coast corridor, settling in for the end of the best games after checking on intriguing matchups early in the process.
(Or your screaming children are demanding Pocoyo, a show about a small child and his friends with no narrative, no structure, and no setting—just a white background and an elephant vibing out with a kid, all narrated with the soothing calmness you know and love from Stephen Fry. When that happens, it’s the ESPN app and Hulu on my phone, but that’s still putting in the work.)
But the later window is lighter, and then we get to the true insomniac hours. If it’s Mountain West hours, WCC hours, Hawaii and whatever they’re getting up to hours… that’s 40 minutes of forming very specific opinions about UC San Diego’s rotation and what’s wrong with UNLV. That’s believing in New Mexico and seeing them so often you get to run the believe-give up-believe again cycle twice in a season.
And into these post-bed time and pre-dawn on the East Coast hours, a hero has emerged.