ESPN has been calling today one of the two best days in the sports calendar. Presumably the Super Bowl is #1, though we’d like to imagine it’s something a bit more offbeat like [insert your own joke here]. Regardless: it’s the opening day of the NCAA Tournament, the march to the Final Four. And in honor of that ultimate final foursome, here are SMW’s Final Four Media Matchups (opening round edition):
1. Billy Packer vs. the Mid-Majors
Billy Packer’s well-publicized confrontation with NCAA Selection Committee Chair Criag Littlepage began during CBS’s Sunday Night Selection Special. Only moments after seeing the brackets for the first time, Packer, in an on-air interview with Littlepage, severely criticized what he felt was a disproportionate number of mid-major teams put into the brackets. Monday, Littlepage returned fire, noting that Packer hadn’t seen many of those mid-major schools play, and that his credibility might be somewhat in question.
As many have pointed out – up to and including Tony & Mike on PTI – CBS has a $6 billion relationship with the NCAA. The tournament is a cash cow of epic proportions, but CBS also has regular season broadcast rights to teams largely from power conferences (the ACC, Big East, Big 10, etc.). The logic falls quite nicely: of course CBS wants upsets and Cinderella stories to come out of the tournament, but it also has some capital investment in ensuring that the power conferences remain powerful and popular enough to draw massive national viewership next January and Februrary.
So watch for Billy Packer. Watch for CBS’s strategy in general with regards to the mid-major schools. See if anyone mentions Cincinnati, the power conference school that got left behind. Expect CBS and Packer to make nice with words (after all, they don’t want the ire of the NCAA) but to revert, with actions, to broadcast strategies that favor power school from the East Coast.
2. Coach K. vs. The Field
In a sport with as much player turnover as NCAA basketball, coaches are the stars. No one knows this better than Duke’s resident patriarch, Mike Krzyzewski. Now it’s time to watch and see what American Express has in store for us this year; last year, Coach K’s own batch of AmEx ads aired throughout the tournament, and brought no shortage of complaints. “It’s unfair,” critics suggest, “because those ads give Coach K added visibility and celebrity that gives him an unfair advantage in recruiting.”
Coach K has refuted all of this, of course, as well as those charges that suggested the refs were biased towards Duke. But in the case of the AmEx ads, it’s not his to refute. Even though the NCAA has issued a statement claiming not to have a problem with those endorsement deals (a statement that does not explicitly mention Coach K’s AmEx deal), the commercials clearly give Duke a recruiting edge. Deal with it.
Which doesn’t make it necessarily wrong, or some sign that Coach K is the Devil. It does mean that he has done a remarkable job branding himself and his school (it helps generate the astronomical appearance fees that he can now charge). So this showdown isn’t just about some credit card commercials – a new batch of which is rumored to be hours away from debut – but because it’s time to look for the other coaches trying to build the same Q-rating. Check out Bruce Pearl at Tennessee, with his own SportsCenter series this week and his trademark sweaty outfit. Check out Jim Calhoun, who could clearly be taking advantage of UConn’s success as a commercial resource but seems uninterested. And across the way, check out Tennessee women’s coaching legend Pat Summit, whose complaints about their #2 seed drew the ire of talking heads yesterday. Careful, Pat: success and branding can make people hate you.
3. Sportsline.com vs. the Fans
This is the big one, especially today. In about an hour CBS will open the floodgates on its March-Madness-On-Demand streaming video service, offering free ad-supported streaming video feeds of all opening round NCAA tournament games. We won’t go over the rules here; Sportsline’s Frequently Asked Questions can answer most of your questions about getting access and staying online. Essentially, after waiting in a virtual line the length of which we can’t really know yet, you will have a chance to stay in a Windows Media Player-based viewer as long as you like, as long as you periodically affirm that you are still present (in other words, you will not be able to open a socket to the viewer and leave it going all weekend even when you go on a beer run).
Questions: Does it work? Are they really ready to handle the overhwhelming number of potential visitors? Can we crash the system, and what will it look like? Will the “waiting room” be so full that the system doesn’t even really function? And apart from the techie questions, does CBS TV heavily cross-promote the streaming online video? And doesn’t having that full streaming platform allow CBS TV to program more exclusively to big-time power schools, since they can always just remind us that all the other games are still available?
Again: possibly, it’s the best thing to happen to NCAA Tournament viewership since they invented auto-refreshing HTML. Or, it’s a disaster, and a disaster that gives CBS the leverage to strip down its broadcast programming (i.e. focusing on single games instead of bouncing back and forth). If it fails, expect CBS to fire somebody from the CSTV side of that acquisition, the buyout that, as we noted at the time, gave CBS the infrastructure necessary to do all of this in the first place. Regardless, we’ll be sitting in that waiting room as long as it takes, and we’ll report back as soon as we know more. See you in line.
4. ESPN vs. the World Baseball Classic
Meanwhile, in other sports: Roger Clemens is about to pitch what may be his last game. SportsCenter is falling all over itself to convince you to watch. Tonight. At 7:30.
Wait, isn’t something else on tonight? College hoops, right?
So Bristol can’t cover the World Baseball Classic enough for its own interests. Some early decent ratings just fed Bristol’s desire to make this into a real event. And maybe it’s working with certain targeted demographics; we don’t have numbers for the uptake on WBC broadcasts in Latin America or among the Latino/a population in the U.S. But the Roger Clemens fanbase is going to watch college basketball; there’s nothing you can do.
And there’s Bristol’s dilemma: pimp the WBC, or cover the sports event to which it doesn’t have broadcast rights. Clearly ESPN is trying to do both, and it’s big enough at this point to do them both quite thoroughly. But it’s worth watching nonetheless – if only for the self-hatred with which John Anderson calls the highlights of the Japan/Korea showdown.
Just remember the lessons of Coach K: once you get big, we like watching you squirm. |
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