The tonnage is not itself a problem, but it exposes more teams to scrutiny. Bad games played by bad teams always existed; they just weren’t on television all the time. College basketball’s exposure to the public, at least on the national level, used to be limited to big-name programs and the drama of tournament play. If they had played 20 years ago, when national college basketball coverage was mostly limited to Saturday network broadcasts, Bennett’s Virginia teams might have been more appreciated because the very fact of their being on television would have signaled that their style was worth watching. Today an early-season snoozer between Wyoming and Boise State can turn off an irritated viewer who, when he sees Virginia, misses out on the intricate quality of their basketball, notices only the low scores and unmade shots and flips over to the N.B.A.

“College basketball is suffering from the same issue that every other sport is suffering from,” Pomeroy told me. “The viewing options are so diverse and the audiences are fragmented, and so popularity is being pulled away and into other places.”

There’s another way to account for what might be ailing college basketball, one that risks feeling almost recklessly emotional. Some of the scandals that have hit big programs as well as all the bad press directed at the N.C.A.A. for exploiting college football and basketball players — reaping millions from broadcast fees while the athletes are paid only in easily revoked scholarships — have chipped away at the myth of innocent collegiate competition. Slow, sloppy play in 2016 might just feel worse than it did in, say, 1982, when Michael Jordan and Patrick Ewing played in the national championship game. Bricked shots are more readily condemned in 2016, when we have all seen college basketball for what it is. The “kid” from 1982 could be more easily forgiven for missing his shot when he was just playing for the love of the game or the name on his uniform.

I’ll admit that, as a college basketball sentimentalist who grew up on Tobacco Road enthralled with Dean Smith’s North Carolina teams, this sort of explanation exerts a pull over me. A seemingly benevolent paternalism hung over that era; Smith was credited as a civil rights pioneer and his program seen as an emblem of a progressive, egalitarian South in stark contrast to the rich Jersey kids who went to Duke. All that should have started to crumble in 2010, when a series of academic scandals in the athletic department began coming to light. The revelations, which included the existence of fake classes for athletes offered in the school’s African and Afro-American studies department, leaked out steadily over the next four years, but they only kicked up in me the slight anxiety that N.C.A.A. sanctions might hurt recruiting, which, in turn, would hurt the team’s chances of beating Duke.

I have not cared about the scandals because my connection to the team is not tied to administrators, coaches and professors. It resides, instead, in a hyperlocal identity within the long history of Carolina basketball. My friends and I hated the quiet crowds and the cabal of rich whitehairs who sat together in matching, powder blue sweaters, but our fandom was built on the team’s identity as an athletic, fast-paced and pro-ready answer to Duke’s line of pious white players — and on a vision of the South. If my enthusiasm for this season has dimmed, it’s not because the best U.N.C. players graduated last year or the school has fallen into scandal but rather because the idea of being a progressive North Carolinian has become undone by the state’s politics. This is a wildly sentimental and nostalgic reaction, but college basketball, perhaps more than any other major American sport, runs on this sort of locally produced sensibility and how it gets projected, however hard it may be to identify, onto the court. Quality of play, whatever it means, will always be, and should be, an afterthought.