When Temple made the Final Four in 1956, Einhorn was sent to Evanston, Ill., by a local station, which gave him an introduction to Walter Byers, then the N.C.A.A.’s executive director, and Wayne Duke, Byers’s assistant. From them, Einhorn learned a valuable lesson about the nonexclusive broadcast rights of N.C.A.A. tournament games.

“Anybody could carry them,” he said, explaining that two stations in the same market could show a game. “I started out by getting games on the rival stations. Obviously, you can’t do that now.”

While at Northwestern, Einhorn founded a radio network, charging stations $100 to pick up each game. He also produced a nationally syndicated radio broadcast of the 1958 championship, all while doing his business from a post office box and a pay phone in the hall of his dormitory. After law school, he graduated to television.

“I wanted to keep doing what I loved,” Einhorn said. “I looked around and said every school is getting thousands of new fans every year just through graduation, so there has to be something here.”

In 1965, Einhorn and TVS secured the rights to the Southeastern Conference, not that it was especially lucrative or that the universities were necessarily ready for television. Once, he arrived at a site to find his equipment drying on a patch of grass outside the gym because of a rainstorm and flood. He recalled another early trip to Mississippi State, where he tried to explain that even though the game was scheduled for a 2 p.m. tip-off, it would be a few minutes later to allow for a commercial after the introductions.

“I had to get one of my guys to set their clock back a few minutes,” Einhorn said. “They couldn’t understand it.”

TVS added several conferences over the next three years, but not enough to sell national advertising. That changed in 1968 when Einhorn put together what became the first nationally televised regular-season game. Nicknamed the Game of the Century, it was a showdown at the Astrodome between undefeated teams with two of the country’s top players, Lew Alcindor, who later became known as Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, and U.C.L.A. versus Elvin Hayes and host Houston.