No. Your talking to the wrong guy. NCAA hoops is God awful because it's all about the tournament. As a cliffsnotes fan, I don't have any reason to care.
Well, the problem you run into with nearly any sport other than football is schedule.
Football, whether NFL or NCAA, is played on the weekends. That means it's something that can be scheduled around. And in the NCAA, it's only 12 games, so it's not a long season either. The NFL is 16 games, but there's so much parity that every game matters for playoff contention, especially if you're pulling for a wild card slot. So it's easy schedule-wise to care, and easy importance-wise to care, about each individual game.
But with other sports, it's apples-and-oranges due to schedule and length of the season.
NCAA basketball is 31 games and has to be played during the week. Outside of die-hard fans, it's hard to follow it all. Die-hard fans care about conference championships, but for casual fans, if there wasn't a tournament they wouldn't know college basketball exists. Heck, for casual fans, if they weren't filling out brackets they probably wouldn't know anything about it.
For most other pro sports, I can't find myself caring. Baseball is 162 games. Like I really have to care whether a team wins or loses one specific game? Basketball is 82 games and the qualifying for the playoffs is a participation trophy. They have star players who rest for games because clearly the teams themselves are willing to sacrifice individual games to save players for the playoffs.
But either NCAA or NFL football is a short enough season, with a limited number of games, that the playoff doesn't make the regular season games unimportant. Every game matters.