KANSAS CITY, Mo. — On a cold night on Tobacco Road, North Carolina and Duke went back and forth in an overtime thriller. It was gripping, edge-of-your seat stuff. Tense down to the final second.

In short, it looked nothing like the Blue Devils’ game against Florida State nine days earlier, when the teams missed five 3-pointers, two free throws and committed five turnovers all before the first media timeout. The Seminoles led at that point, 2-0.

“Never seen a media timeout with a score quite like this,” tweeted ESPN analyst Jay Bilas, an outspoken critic of the current state of college hoops. “Maybe in baseball.”

Bilas is not alone in his concern for the current state of college hoops. Scoring is at a near-record low this season. Fouls are soaring. Attendance has dropped precipitously in many places, and television ratings are struggling to reach last year’s levels.

“When you think about it, it’s a spectator sport,” said Utah State athletic director Scott Barnes, the chairman of the NCAA tournament selection committee. “So how folks view it — I guess, watchability — would be a big piece of it. Are they entertained?”

The fact that the upcoming NCAA Tournament, long-considered recession proof, has struggled to build buzz is perhaps the most damning evidence of the dire state of the game.

“I do have some healthy concerns,” said Dan Gavitt, the NCAA’s vice president for men’s college basketball. “If the game continues to go in the direction it has been the last several years, with scoring being down and physical play being up, it could really hurt it.”

That’s a sobering assessment from one of the game’s most important stakeholders.

Attendance in men’s Division I basketball has fallen seven straight seasons, from an average of 5,327 in 2006-07 to 4,817 last year. The Southeastern Conference even asked its TV partners for flexibility in scheduling to help drive fans to the arena.

Not that life has been easy on broadcasters, either. ESPN and CBS, two networks with a long college basketball tradition, have both weathered a decline in ratings this season. As of last week, ESPN was averaging just under 1.5 million viewers on its main network for men’s basketball games, down about 6 percent from the same period last year.

The NCAA tried to intervene last year, instituting a series of rules reforms designed to boost scoring and free up offenses to do what they do best. They have failed to stick. Now, some schools have resorted to outlandish gimmicks to sell seats, and TV executives have been force to expand pregame shows to help drive interest.

“There are a lot of things competing for eyeballs,” said Nick Dawson, the senior director of programming and acquisitions for ESPN, whose job is to help televise more than 1,300 games.

“We do so many games, you see all kinds,” Dawson said. “There are some played at a high level, fantastic entertainment value, great flow. We’ve seen a bunch. But you also get a bunch that don’t have that flow and that don’t live up to those expectations.”

Just consider some of those games:

Georgia Tech was held to 28 points by Virginia in late January, one of three times that the Cavaliers have kept an opponent below 30 points. In one of those games, Virginia didn’t do a whole lot better, grinding its way to a 45-26 victory over Rutgers.

Arizona and Utah, two teams with national title aspirations, combined for 46 fouls just a couple of weeks ago. Wildcats star Stanley Johnson went 3 for 19 from the field.

Think that was a lot of fouls? St. Francis and LIU-Brooklyn conspired to commit 66 fouls and shoot 97 free throws last month, accounting for nearly half of the points scored.

In a game against West Virginia, Kansas went 0 for 15 from beyond the arc — and won.

“I think scoring is way down. And I think a lot of that is bad offense,” Kansas coach Bill Self said.