The college football season reached a bit of a climax on Tuesday evening where the College Football Playoff committee released their inaugural rankings for the 2015 season. Like always, there is a lot of fuss about nothing because really, there is still over a month’s worth of games to still be played.

As always, you can find programs like Alabama, Notre Dame, and Ohio State among the top of the rankings. However, it looks as if TCU, Baylor, and Utah may be here to stay, while others such as Temple, Memphis, and even James Madison, begin to enjoy the heightened pedestal that has been allotted to them as more wins accrue. Taking this full circle, how might the college football success impact, both negatively and positively, the basketball side of things at any respective college?

Whenever programs like VCU and Butler reached the Final Four in the past few years, the application rate jumped through the roof. A heightened scale on the athletics spectrum always brings a trickle down affect for the university as a whole.

The same can be said for an athletics department and as a program like Temple has seen unbelievable success this college football season where the AAC program just hosted College Game Day this past weekend, one source within the program noted on what the attention could bring. “I think the more exposure your school and programs get, the more it can assist and help recruits, parents, and coaches to identify and open the ears to hearing from that institution. The excitement of the things occurring on campus and within the athletic and academic programs will help you get involved with kids, but ultimately the goals, achievements, success, and vision of your own program is the only thing that will carry you throughout the process.”

Before Temple hosted College Game Day, James Madison, though not a part of the FBS, found a way to use its elite quarterback prospect Vad Lee, to bring in Lee Corso and gang to Harrisonburg, something that brought quite the amount of publicity for the entire university. In the meantime, the basketball program made sure to use the heightened scale to further its reach with prospects. “With the program and the school on ESPN, Sports Center and Gameday, we just have to make sure they know and they watch it.  It undoubtedly helps with kids because it’s the national media and that kind of media attention creates a buzz around the school when people talk about it,” said one person within the CAA program.

While Temple and James Madison are enjoying new heights on the gridiron, which in turn is positively affecting the hoop scene, others such as TCU and Baylor seem to have announced themselves pretty clearly as potential NCAA Champions in any given year.

Working hand-in-hand with other athletic programs and teams is always important in which each can play off of each other’s successes. At Baylor and ever since Robert Griffin III’s playing days, the Bears have been a national brand and one that the basketball program has attached onto. “We get along great with our football staff as they are wonderful people.  There are many talented players who have a desire to play football and basketball in college because they are gifted athletes so we are in touch about those prospects.  We have had two guys here who have played both sports and each ended up playing in NFL,” noted one personal affiliated with the Big 12 hoops squad.

As we have seen in recent weeks, getting kids onto campus during these primetime football contests definitely makes things a bit easier in securing a verbal commitment from a certain prospect. Most of the time, the more crucial of football contests between say a Baylor and TCU outing, which might bring out the best from the university and from the giant fan base, the basketball program will then attempt to host their more prioritized recruits. “For home football games, it really depends on the opponent and the time of the year.  Every home football game has been different and I have seen it done both ways, in regards to bringing in just one kid and his family or bringing in multiple kids.  If we had a preference, we would like to bring in multiple high level kids because let’s face it, in this day and age, the kids want to hang out with guys that they can see themselves playing with in the future,” one high-major coach said.

Another power conference coach at a highly successful football school gave his own two cents on the matter: “It depends on the weekend.  Sometimes we are zeroed in on a couple of families, other times we bring in a number of prospects.  We don’t have a set rule.  We do, however, try to have prospects each weekend during the fall before basketball season gets going and weekends are filled with games and game preparations.”

Some schools have learned how to share the added spotlight with each other at such places like Baylor, Ohio State, and Florida, while others like TCU have been labeled as a football school. It can sometimes be seen in a negative light by some by the program’s other half, but it is something that the Big 12 basketball staff has accepted and enjoyed. “Our basketball program respects and understands the importance of football and success of its program.  Without the success of football in the recent years, we wouldn’t be in the Big 12 and we would not receive a lot of benefits that we would have received, such as our Nike contract and other resources, which ultimately help basketball and other sports.  We understand that football is a big time money maker and for us to all be consistently successful, it helps when football is successful as well.”

So while the college football season gets even more magnified in the coming weeks leading up to the final four that will be released on December 7, don’t forget that college basketball programs across the land are using the added publicity in grabbing a larger reach with the general public, and even more importantly, college prospects and their families.