ABC first broadcast selected college basketball games of the now-NCAA Division I during the 1960s and 1970s, before it began televising them on a regular basis on January 18, 1987, with a game between the LSU Tigers and Kentucky Wildcats). As CBS and NBC were also broadcasting college games at the time, this put the sport on all three major broadcast television networks.
After the ABC Sports division was merged into ESPN Inc. by parent company Disney in 2006, broadcasts have since been produced by ESPN, and have primarily used the ESPN College Basketball branding and graphics instead of the College Basketball on ABC branding.
After a five-year hiatus, ABC returned to airing college basketball in 2019 with five games on the network, and has continued to do so since.
Men's Coverage overview
1962, 1973, 1978
ABC first broadcast college basketball games in 1962, when the network aired the NCAA Championship Game on a day-behind delayed basis, as part of its Wide World of Sports anthology series. On December 15, 1973, ABC aired what is considered to be the first telecast of a regular season college basketball game by a major broadcast network. A feature of the afternoon episode of the program, ABC's Wide World of Sports, the game was a special presentation rather than the start of regular telecasts., and matched UCLA and North Carolina State in St. Louis). Previously, postseason games in the NCAA tournament had been shown on NBC. Regular season college basketball games, though not on ABC, NBC or CBS, had been syndicated to U.S. television stations, such as the so-called ""Game of the Century"" sold to stations nationwide by the TVS Television Network in 1968. ABC (which had recently lost the NBA rights to CBS) televised this game using its former NBA announcing crew of Keith Jackson and Bill Russell.
In the 1977–78 season, C.D. Chesley (who controlled the rights to the Atlantic Coast Conference (ACC) at the time) wanted NBC to televise select ACC games as part of its national package as it had done the previous few years. However, NBC wanted to feature intersectional games. This action greatly upset Chesley, who wound up selling the rights to the ACC Tournament final to ABC. ABC would televise the 1978 ACC Tournament final as part of Wide World of Sports. The game, called by Jim Lampley and Bill Russell, marked the first time Duke University's Blue Devils basketball team played on national television.
1987–2014
When ABC's coverage began in 1987, the network primarily covered the Big Ten, Big 8 and Pac-10 Conferences. By 1991 (around the time NBC was phasing out their own college basketball coverage), ABC ramped up its basketball coverage in an effort to fill the void. As a result, the network also started to cover games focusing on teams from the Atlantic Coast Conference (ACC) and Southeastern Conference (SEC). Otherwise, it was essentially, a considerable hodge-podge with an ACC game one week, or a Pac-10 or Big 10 game the next. The games that were broadcast were a hodge-podge of conference matchups even after the ESPN on ABC brand change, with SEC and Big East match-ups occasionally being shown alongside frequent ACC, Big 12 and Pac-10 match-ups.
ABC's early regular season broadcasts were, for the most part, technically time buys from organizations such as Raycom (particularly, around 1990–91) or sister network ESPN. This in return, was a way to avoid union contracts which require that 100% of network shows had to use crew staff who were network union members. During the early 1990s, Raycom paid ABC US$1.8 million for six weeks of network airtime of 26 regional games. The format allowed Raycom to control the games and sell the advertising.
In the 1987–88 season, ABC did not air any college basketball games during the last three weekends of February due to the network's coverage of the Winter Olympics. As previously mentioned, coverage by ABC steadily increased during the early 1990s; by the 1991–92 season, ABC was carrying regional games in many timeslots on Saturday and Sunday afternoons. By 1997, ABC's presenting sponsor was Paine Webber.