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March Madness has more appeal than the NBA among casual sports fans and that current is hard to fight, but I have to go with the NBA as the better league.

I will admit that the sheer number of games in a regular season takes away the value of each game (an NBA season is approximately three times longer than a college team's season), but each game is better in the NBA. It's for the same reason that even though an uneducated spectator without a stopwatch couldn't tell the difference between sprinters at a high school meet, or sprinters in the Olympics (the same applies for running, skiing, and a brevy of other sports), you would have a much harder time getting them to tune into a high school track meet than the Olympics: It's the authenticity of knowing that the people on the court are the best at what they do.

There's also an interesting issue of whether the familiarity and brand name of the players is better. Since college players are leaving within a year from college and NBA players stay within the league of several years, you can become familiar and actively root for players in the NBA better. On the other hand, there are far more trades in the NBA then there are students who transfer, so you're allegiance to those players based on their team affiliation is more in flux and a player who you might actively follow might go from being a starter to being either on a non-playoff or an underused reserve and become invisible (for example, has anyone heard about the whereabouts of Zach Randolph, Trenton Hassell, Jamal Magloire, or Antoine Walker recently?). In this sense, trades and the constant firing of coaches do make it hard for fans to get attached to teams in the NBA and coaches get fired at the college level with a little less frequency. Ideally, however, the NBA and college basketball are symbiotic in the branding of players if they start in college and make a name for themselves there like Kevin Durant, Carmelo Anthony or, way back in the day, Grant Hill. On the level of NBA players who aren't superstars, you might be a fan of someone like Morris Petersen for winning Tom Izzo a championship at <?xml:namespace prefix = st1 ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:off ice:smarttags" />Michigan State and have a casual interest in following him on the New Orleans Hornets even though he is by no means a star.

There are also arguments that the college game is purer because the NBA players have ruined the spirit of the game with their big cars and large paychecks that

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