The College Basketball Capital of the World

The College Basketball Capital of the World

Louisville’s TV ratings dwarf every U.S. market; which city wins the other sports?

By Ben Cohen and Kevin Clark in the Wall Street Journal

The one U.S. city that is most obsessed with college basketball is in Kentucky, of course. It’s the home of a school with a rich pedigree, a recent national championship and, most important, a rival that fits the exact same description.

The residents of Lexington, Ky., have an unbeaten team in the Kentucky Wildcats. But the citizens of Louisville can claim a different title: People there watch more college basketball than any other place on the planet.

Louisville has entered a rarified group of cities with almost nothing in common except their unhinged devotion to a single sport. In short, Louisville is the television capital of college basketball—just like Buffalo, N.Y., is the hub of hockey and Oklahoma City is the nerve center of golf.

People in Kentucky don’t just watch their own teams more than anyone else. They watch every team more than anyone else. Louisville has registered the country’s highest television ratings among metered markets in college-basketball programming for at least the last dozen years, according to ESPN data.

This year, though, an extraordinary set of circumstances is stretching the limits of how much college basketball even Kentuckians can consume. With two weeks until the NCAA tournament, No. 1-ranked Kentucky is unbeaten at 30-0, closing in on the first undefeated season in Division I men’s college basketball since Indiana in 1976.