Few things in life elicit more pleasure than watching seven consecutive hours of television. Except, of course, watching seven consecutive hours of college basketball.

Therein lays the appeal of Big Monday, ESPN’s college basketball spectacle that perfectly fits college students’ schedules. Every Monday night during the college basketball season, the network airs three games, at 7, 9 and midnight.

The games whisk viewers on a veritable cross-country tour – from the East coast game that airs at 7, to the Central time zone game at 9, to the midnight Mountain West Conference game whose exciting conclusion often goose-pimples the skin.

But this past Monday proved particularly special. With the Super Bowl – and all its cross-promotional, celebrity-infested nonsense – out of the way, the sports nation turns its eyes to a relatively purer product. Indeed, on Sunday, my heart – and gambling bone – melted when I saw a March Madness commercial for the first time this year.

So as the country’s college basketball teams began the race toward the NCAA Tournament, I resolved to root myself into my futon and watch Big Monday in its entirety, basking in the evening’s simplest pleasures until 2 a.m.

First, a disclaimer: I’ve discovered that I’m merely an amateur Big Monday marathoner.

Two of my roommates gather with 15 to 20 of their friends every Monday at a Livingston Avenue house for what amounts to a Big Monday fraternity. These guys are so serious that if one ‘member’ arrives late to the house, he is locked out and never allowed back. During a break from my date with the boob tube Monday, I witnessed one of my roommates, who had neglected his Big Monday duties, writing a 10-page plea to regain membership.

Earlier, I had arrived home late, missing the first several minutes of a Syracuse-Connecticut game that would soon degenerate into a blowout. By 8 p.m., I was bored enough to be distracted by ESPN’s score ticker that runs across the bottom of the screen. Hey, Gardner Webb is beating Lipscomb!

Big Monday, is, after all, an all-inclusive program. ESPN scrolls hundreds of Division I scores – most of which include schools, like Gardner Webb and Robert Morris, that sound more like Confederate generals than institutions of higher education.

Yet Big Monday remains one of the few ways to track even the smallest of colleges. While watching the Kansas-Missouri game at 9, I learned that North Carolina A&T was sticking with Howard – the team, not the duck. A quick check later that night of North Carolina A&T’s Web site revealed that Greg Davis – yes, SU flameout Greg Davis – averages 2.8 points for the 1-18 Aggies.

All this reminiscing almost overshadowed the fact that Missouri and Kansas were playing out a Border War on my TV. Yes, that’s what the Tigers and Jayhawks call their rivalry, which helped ESPN kick off its Rivalry Week. The Jayhawks beat the Tigers, 65-56, and segued into SportsCenter, which aired at 11 p.m. before the Mountain West game.

I decided to rest from my leisurely pursuit – mostly because SportsCenter’s hipster, self-serving style churns my stomach. But a commercial that flashed across my screen mesmerized me. Was that Magic Johnson singing on a Lincoln Navigator commercial? Yes! That was the most embarrassing thing I’d seen since, well, Magic Johnson’s late-night talk show, ‘The Magic Hour’ – one of our generation’s greatest displays of entertainment incompetence.

I chuckled at Magic’s singing for the next hour before readying myself for the Mountain West game between UNLV and Air Force.

At 15-2, the Falcons were a surprise team that confounded opponents with Princeton-style back-door cuts. UNLV, though, had the comforts of its Sin City home arena, the Thomas & Mack Center, on its side. Unfortunately for the Rebels, the arena appeared half-empty. I suppose there are more exciting things to do in a city where prostitution is legal.

Bob Carpenter and Jimmy Dykes called the Rebels-Falcons game as they do every Big Monday Mountain West matchup. They travel between exotic locales like Albuquerque, N.M., and Laramie, Wyo., and Provo, Utah. Of course, sin-and-skin trips to Vegas and San Diego must boost their morale.

Air Force-UNLV failed to attain the Mountain West mystique that the conference has established over the past two years on Big Monday. UNLV won, 63-50, and I dozed off during the middle of the second half – a half hour short of my seven-hour goal.

At least there’s always next Monday.

Darryl Slater is a staff writer at The Daily Orange, where his columns appear occasionally. E-mail him at dpslater@syr.edu.

Published on February 3, 2004 at 12:00 pm