In recent weeks, as another college football regular season concluded in dramatic fashion and universities once again began to switch conference affiliations, the college basketball season started. The general sports fan could be forgiven for not noticing.

College basketball has long been defined by its postseason tournament, the crowd-pleasing spectacle known as March Madness. While the tournament results in millions of people filling out brackets for office pools and accounts for roughly 90 percent of the NCAA’s annual revenue, it has rendered the sport’s regular season largely irrelevant.

“For the most part, you can go through November and December, and people who aren’t die-hard enthusiasts aren’t even aware that college basketball is taking place,” said Mike Tranghese, a former commissioner of the Big East Conference.

Attendance at regular-season games has dropped in recent years. So have television ratings. That, combined with the overwhelming popularity of college football and the hundreds of millions of dollars that sport generates in TV contracts, effectively forced basketball to the background as conferences scrambled to reconfigure.

The Big East is a prime example of this trend. It started as a basketball conference, grew into a premier league and factored into the rise of ESPN. It collected national championships and featured countless stars, and its annual conference tournament at Madison Square Garden became a crown jewel of the sports season.

Then West Virginia left. Syracuse and Pittsburgh will do so after this season. Louisville, ranked No. 6 in basketball, recently announced it would join Syracuse and Pittsburgh in the Atlantic Coast Conference. Rutgers decided to move to the Big Ten.

Football drove all of these departures, and the Big East reconfigured with teams in Texas and Idaho and California, none eastern in location or steeped in basketball tradition. On Sunday, seven of the Big East’s so-called basketball schools — Seton Hall, Villanova, Marquette, St. John’s, Georgetown, Providence and DePaul — met with the conference’s new commissioner, Mike Aresco, in New York to lay out their concerns about the future.

Aresco, who previously worked for CBS, acknowledged the issues facing college basketball.

“There are limits to what you can do with the regular season,” he said. “You have to work with the model you have. It won’t be the same as it was. We’re not going back to the ’70s or ’80s.”

To that end, college basketball finds itself in something of a quandary. Much of what makes the tournament so popular makes the regular season less so. Tranghese cited a lack of alternatives. For all the criticism of football’s Bowl Championship Series, “the value for that has gone through the roof,” Tranghese said, adding: “Why? The regular season is so important. That’s the problem with college basketball.”

When basketball teams finish fifth in major conferences and still advance deep into the NCAA tournament — or win regular-season titles in mid-major conferences but fail to make the tournament — the value of those thousands of games played from November to February is diminished, and greatly.

“Once the reforms to the college football postseason are complete, we have a responsibility to think long and hard about how we can improve the basketball regular season,” said Larry Scott, commissioner of the Pacific-12 Conference. “The game deserves it.”

As it stands, the nonconference schedule begins in early November, opposite both college football and the NFL. As Scott conducted a phone interview last month, Pac-12 football teams prepared for games of national importance, ripe with postseason implications.

Alabama, a member of the Southeastern Conference, won its 10th football game that weekend. When the Crimson Tide play in the BCS title game Jan. 7, their basketball counterparts will have played 13 games.

“There’s so much happening in November,” said Clark Kellogg, a college basketball analyst for CBS Sports. “It’s like a closet full of shoes; we’re all on top of each other. I’m not ready to say the regular season is diminished, but you have to capture that attention span, and it’s shorter than before.”

So many games, often shown late on television and frequently featuring one-sided matchups, only compound the relevance problem. That speaks to supply and demand: a great supply of college basketball and a great demand for college football.

In addition, the prevalence of so-called one-and-done stars, who go to college for the obligatory year before leaving for the NBA, causes the rosters for traditional powers to change more often and more drastically.

“College basketball is becoming more difficult to watch,” said Jay Williams, a Duke star turned ESPN analyst. “It’s becoming more difficult for the everyday viewer to follow, with transfers and one-and-done and conference realignment. It’s becoming more difficult for me to follow. Each year, you have to push the reset button.”

The Chronicle of Higher Education published an attendance analysis in March. It found that for about one in every five Division I men’s basketball programs, regular-season attendance dropped by at least 20 percent over the past four seasons. The Pac-12 had a 14 percent decrease since 2009.

So how to fix the regular season, then? The most posited theory is to move the beginning of the season after Thanksgiving or even later, to make basketball more of a one-semester sport. Jim Haney, the executive director of the National Association of Basketball Coaches, said that calendar shift would theoretically draw more casual fans. Duke could still play North Carolina after the Super Bowl, but that game, among the biggest draws in college hoops, would occur earlier in the theoretical season.

The approach is not without its limitations. The NCAA tournament would be pushed deeper into April and up against the Masters golf tournament. The NFL and college football’s bowl season would still draw TV viewers and sponsor dollars. Long-term television contracts would need to be amended.

“I don’t think there’s any question you would get big-time pushback from CBS on changing the schedule,” said Bob Bowlsby, the commissioner of the Big 12, referring to the network that televises much of the tournament, including the semifinals and the final. “And probably from Turner as well.”

To infuse more excitement in early November, college basketball in recent years has turned to tournaments that feature the best teams, as well as gimmick games. Mark Hollis, the athletic director at Michigan State, staged one 2003 contest at Ford Field in Detroit and helped stage a game on an aircraft carrier last season. Those events, Hollis said, are designed to “wake up the sense that college basketball is still here.”

Several games scheduled to be played outdoors this season met with trouble. A game between Syracuse and San Diego State was postponed because of the weather, a Florida-Georgetown contest ended at halftime because the court was too wet, and the Ohio State-Marquette game was canceled, again for weather, before it started.

Short of gimmicks, college basketball could reward regular-season champions, not conference-tournament champions, with automatic NCAA tournament slots. Washington, for instance, won the Pac-12 last season but did not obtain an at-large tournament bid, a rarity for a major conference and, to those involved, an injustice.

“The decision to exclude Washington was a terrible statement and a signal that the regular season doesn’t matter,” Scott, the Pac-12 commissioner, said.

A game at Barclays Center in Brooklyn last month featured the defending champion Kentucky Wildcats. ESPN televised the game in prime time. Jay-Z clapped from the front row.

Kentucky defeated Maryland behind another collection of acclaimed freshmen early into their one-year mandated college stopover. Coach John Calipari called it “a learning experience” and “a teaching moment,” two phrases that neatly summarized the first two months of the college hoops calendar.

Soon afterward, Kentucky joined elite programs Kansas, Duke and Michigan State — a college basketball Mount Rushmore — for a doubleheader at Atlanta’s Georgia Dome, site of this season’s Final Four. Kentucky fell to Duke but expected to be playing far better by March.

“Still learning,” Calipari said.

Should Kentucky, which has dropped from the Top 25, improve greatly and in time for the postseason, few would be surprised. Its early-season struggles would register as no more than a blip. Only the most interested fans would notice. Regular season? What regular season?

“We have to think about how to fix it,” Bowlsby, of the Big 12, said. “We have to. If there’s waning interest in the regular season, there will be waning interest in the postseason at some point.”