Let's not forget the trickle-down effect on college sports: While the NBA and NFL became less popular after the "Year Without Sports," college basketball and football became more popular, as they were widely seen as the last bastion of athletic achievement seemingly unencumbered by money and greed. (It helped that they were unaffected by all the professional strikes and lockouts.) The 1995 NCAA Basketball Tournament was the most-watched sporting event of the year, and the New Year's Day college football bowls were very close behind.
Shortly thereafter, though, publications including The New York Times and Sports Illustrated broke a series of stories involving the greed surrounding college sports, including high coach and athletic director salaries, student-athletes receiving improper benefits, and the heads of supposedly "non-profit" bowl games spending the millions the games made on their lifestyles. The NCAA, motivated by the high-profile scandals, the concurrent problems surrounding the professional leagues, as well as overwhelming public opinion demanding reforms, decided to take radical actions to preserve the sanctity of college athletics. They asked that schools set maximum salaries for coaches and athletic administrators, banned most "boosters" from directly associating with college athletics, and set extremely strict rules on student-athlete benefits, with violators subject to the "death penalty" (the offending program was shut down for 1-2 years). Finally, the NCAA bought out all the major college football bowl games and reorganized them into an official Division 1-A playoff set up similarly to the basketball tournament. (16 teams, automatic bids for conference champions, at-large teams determined by committee). The minor bowls continued to exist independent of the NCAA (but were monitored very closely for potential corruption), and were allowed to pick teams not in the playoff. Finally, the NCAA instituted a form of "revenue sharing" that pools all the money made from regional and national TV contracts and distributes them evenly with all Division 1 schools - largely benefiting smaller schools in minor conferences.
The NCAA's radical reforms helped to level the playing field between the blue-blood programs (like Alabama in football and Duke in basketball) and smaller schools. Additionally, with professional careers in football and basketball less desirable (and traditional powerhouses now unable to effectively "buy" top recruits), top high-school players were less enticed to play for those traditional powerhouses; instead they often play for smaller or lower-profile schools closer to home, further increasing parity in college football and basketball. The results ended up speaking for themselves.
The famed upset of 1-seed Kentucky by 16-seed Cal State Northridge in the first round of the 2002 NCAA basketball tournament would prove to be the first of several 16-over-1 and 15-over-2 upsets, and in 2011 14-seed Columbia went all the way to the Final Four. Meanwhile, the new college football tournament saw its own fair share of Cinderellas - we all remember Boise State, out of the WAC, upsetting Ohio State, Florida, and USC to win the 2008 football championship. The fact that "any team can win it all" helps endear fans to college sports, and many credit the NCAA's bold and radical reforms over 20 years ago for making sure college football and basketball didn't follow the same road of greed to destruction and irrelevance their professional counterparts drove down.
The best part for IndyCar nuts like me in that 1995 season was seeing Tony George take note of all those new fans and do a 180 on the Indy Racing League when it came to rivaling CART, going from pariah from hero in just a few years as a direct result.