Would college basketball be better off with March Madness taking place in April? Associated Press

What if college basketball were a one-semester sport?

Some people already think it is. In fact, many treat it like a one-month sport. Not until the office gambling pools materialize in March are many Americans aware that college basketball exists. Actually, the season begins in November and ends in April, a slog that makes Russian novels feel breezy. The final part is similarly riveting: By those glorious weeks of March, when everyone you know stays home from work because of that case of the sniffles going around, college basketball is the only game in town.

But the catch is that college-basketball teams start practicing in September, scrimmaging in October and playing real games that no one watches before Thanksgiving. This time of year, the sport can be magical, like listening to an indie band years before they hit it big. But when nobody pays attention, it can also be frustrating, like listening to an indie band years before they hit it big.

Even some marquee events before New Year's Day are stuck in the long shadow of college football. Michigan State's win over Kentucky in the Nov. 12 Champions Classic averaged 4 million viewers for a 2.6 rating, the second-highest nonconference game ever broadcast by ESPN. It was a remarkable number by any measure—except that of college football. This season on CBS, every featured Southeastern Conference football game earned at least a 2.6 rating.

Going up against college football is a losing proposition for pretty much anything that isn't professional football or a laugh-track network sitcom. But the logic is especially silly for college basketball. C.M. Newton, the former Alabama basketball coach and Kentucky athletic director, has said for years that the basketball season should start after fall exams. Even then, before this time of declining interest in attending live sports events, "it made no sense to me that your two profit-makers should go head-to-head for the entertainment dollar," he said.

Football is indeed the money-maker for almost all Division-I athletic departments. In 2012, for the average athletic department, 39% of revenue came from football and 12% from men's basketball, according to Department of Education data. The average basketball team earned $2.7 million. The average football team's profit was $10.7 million.

At last week's IMG Intercollegiate Athletics Forum, the annual gathering for power brokers of college sports, IMG College president Ben Sutton also floated the idea of making college basketball a one-semester sport, thus removing the football competition and shortening the season. "Scarcity is generally a good thing in sports," he said later through a spokesman.

Rethinking the college-basketball season wouldn't represent a betrayal of its roots. The sport was invented more than a century ago as an indoor activity—that is, something to do when it wasn't football season—and it turns out that James Naismith was onto something. "Particularly in the South, but in other parts of the country now, the mentality of most fans is that basketball season starts when the football bowl game is over," Newton said.

To be sure, this is mostly idle convention chatter, and there isn't much momentum for a reorganization of college basketball's schedule. When an NCAA tournament committee discussed the idea at its summer meeting, the group identified "real, significant logistical challenges" in pushing the event back, said Dan Gavitt, the NCAA's men's basketball vice president.

It wasn't just the loss of alliteration in potentially bumping March Madness to April. The NBA playoffs this season open April 19, less than two weeks after the Final Four, meaning college basketball would have to compete for exposure and marketing with a spiffier version of itself. The sport would have to fight for space: Nine of the 12 venues used for the NCAA tournament's second, third and regional rounds are the homes of NBA and NHL teams that could be hosting playoff games then. Squeezing an entire regular season into two months isn't any more feasible. Then there are the television concerns. CBS reached a $10.8 billion deal with the NCAA in 2010 to keep the NCAA tournament through 2024.

College coaches aren't exactly pressing for change, either. Duke coach Mike Krzyzewski speaks often about college basketball's need for a commissioner, someone who would oversee rules, marketing, finances and all the other logistics of a complicated sport. His sport would benefit from a buzzier beginning to the season, he said Thursday, but the calendar itself shouldn't be an item on that czar's agenda.

"I don't think it can be a one-semester sport," he said.

One and Done is the Journal's weekly college-basketball column.

Write to Ben Cohen at ben.cohen@wsj.com