ESPN exposure for Villanova is worth the cost

Villanova spent nearly $50,000 equipping the Pavilion for ESPN's College GameDay telecast on Saturday morning. Renting two video boards cost $22,000. Building a platform to accommodate the announcers cost nearly another $30,000.

The university sacrificed the additional revenue it could have generated by holding Saturday night's game against fourth-ranked Pittsburgh at the spacious Wells Fargo Center instead of the 6,500-seat Pavilion.

But the bump it received from having the university and the basketball program on the goliath that is ESPN for two hours on Saturday?

"Impossible to value," Villanova athletic director Vince Nicastro said.

From 10 a.m. to noon on Saturday, it was as if ESPN were running a two-hour infomercial about Villanova. Rece Davis, Hubert Davis, Digger Phelps, and Jay Bilas sat at midcourt and discussed college basketball, with Erin Andrews, when not graciously agreeing to pose for a picture with someone's infant or obliging an autograph request, interviewing Jay Wright.

Sure, there was talk about Ohio State and Wisconsin, Louisville and Syracuse, Kentucky and Vanderbilt. But the focus was 'Nova Nation. The students, nearly two-thirds of the undergraduate enrollment in attendance with signs and shirts, screaming and bouncing and making it deafeningly loud. The campus. The coach. The program. The success.

ESPN ran a touching piece about two student managers, sophomore Frank Kineavy and freshman Nick Gaynor, who have cerebral palsy. It showed an instructional piece in which Wright used Corey Fisher to demonstrate how he teaches Villanova's guards to drive into the lane and draw fouls. Andrews interviewed Wright for nearly five minutes, and the whole team watched as the school retired the jersey of former Wildcat Randy Foye, now in his fourth NBA season.

In this day and age, you can't pay enough for that kind of positive exposure. On ESPN. During its marquee show. As the regular season grinds to an end. When people have closed the book on the NFL season and turned their attention to college hoops.

Never mind that later that night the basketball team, ranked ninth in the country, put its 46-game winning streak at the Pavilion on the line against the fourth-ranked Panthers, who had lost just two games all season. On ESPN. As the featured game of the day.