Re: Beanpot LXV - Does Anything Else Even Matter?
I'm not sure it ever got much attention outside of Boston.
Actually, it did. ESPN carried at least the championship game (and maybe all of them but the memory is fuzzy) back in the '70s and '80s. It was the only way I was able to watch it back in those pre-internet days when I was living far from Boston. And it also got some decent level of coverage on SportsCenter during the years ESPN carried the games. I also worked as a student assistant SID back in that day and know we handled a fair number of queries from newspapers and TV stations outside of the immediate Boston area. So yes, the Beanpot got much better coverage both in Boston and nationally than it has been getting in more recent years.
Several reasons for this, among them: ESPN and the other national sports networks are overwhelmingly pro sports oriented. College coverage is pretty much limited to football and hoops, with the focus by and large on teams that have large national followings. It's all about maximizing eyeballs on the screens and so college hockey, in general, and events like the Beanpot, in particular, don't get much network-level interest.
Beyond that, it's a new day and a new way. There are powerful forces like Netflix, networked gaming, and the various flavors of social media competing for time, attention, and dollars, not to mention those all-important eyeballs. People have a lot more choices than they did back in the '80s, which leads me to perceive more than a few people who would have flocked to things like the Beanpot even 10 years ago have developed interests other than college sports, even when their own colleges are involved.
All of that being said, the first step toward the Beanpot's becoming a "big thing" again, IMHO, would be for Harvard to win Episode LXV. All due respect to BU but 30 Beanpots out of 65 has probably taken whatever drama might have been left in what was at one time was a drama-filled event.
