The NBA is becoming a Hallmark movie – at least with respect to television viewership. According to Front Office Sports, televised 2024-2025 regular season NBA games averaged 1.53 million viewers, slightly less than the 1.56 million average viewers for the weekly Hallmark Original Movie. Unlike Hallmark movies, however, NBA games do not always end with the nice guy in a sweater winning over the uber-successful ad executive who only reluctantly returns to her small hometown for their class reunion.

Famed New York Yankees catcher and sidewalk philosopher Yogi Berra once observed that “if people don’t want to come out to the ballpark, nobody’s gonna stop them.” The same applies to television viewership – and some of the figures are intriguing.

NBA executives blamed soft playoff viewership this year on the small market teams in the finals: Oklahoma City and Indianapolis. That excuse doesn’t hold water, however, when you consider that the Alabama-Tennessee regular season football game last season drew 10.2 million viewers. Knoxville and Tuscaloosa aren’t exactly major media markets.

Maybe people just like college football more than they do professional basketball. In the inaugural season of SEC football on ABC, the 46 televised regular season games averaged 6.4 million viewers, dwarfing the NBA. Even Boise State vs. UNLV drew 3 million CBS viewers last fall, twice the average NBA game.

If NBA viewership is waning, college softball is in a full-scale bull market. The Lady Vols’ Women’s College World Series win over UCLA earlier this month drew a peak of 3.9 million viewers – outdrawing the 3.6 million people who watched Tennessee’s football team beat Vanderbilt last fall (while crushing both the NBA and Hallmark in the process.)

I grew up a fan of Wilt Chamberlain vs. Bill Russell, and later, Dr. J, Michael Jordan and Larry Bird. I could never imagine a world where four times as many people would watch the Pop-Tarts Bowl (6.8 million viewers for Iowa State vs. Miami this past December) than pro basketball. Of course, there are people who assumed that the 140,000 sell-out crowds for Bristol’s Food City 500 would last forever, never imagining the stands two-thirds empty for one of the sport’s signature events.

But the same was also true of Sears, Toys “R” Us and Hooters. These seemed like permanent fixtures in our society – until they weren’t. It’s a history lesson worth noting for NBA executives – as well as the people running Amazon, Apple and college football. No institution is too big to fail.

David Moon is president of Moon Capital Management. A version of this piece originally appeared in the USA TODAY NETWORK.