 It’s NCAA Tournament time, which guarantees a couple of things: odd announcer teams for CBS, way too much Dickie V on SportsCenter, schools you’ve never heard of suddenly becoming national names, and (last but not least) gimmick coverage of the tourney from the semi-sports media. Now, it would be wrong to take all of these gimmicks and turn them into a gimmick for the purpose of analysis … I’m above that … really … stop tempting me … OK, I give!
While we try to break down the work of the semi-sports media here every week, this time of year requires extra scrutiny. As those of you who follow these media know, every March, the members of the semi-sports media decide it’s their solemn duty to put their own unique twist on the NCAA tournament. This makes sense in principle; after all, the semi-sports media is designed to cover sports in a different way than mainstream reporters and analysts. And so it’s only natural that as the semi-sports media itself expanded, so would the array of stories it produces about a singular event. Thus, a trend that started with a couple of kooky stories on Page 2 in the days preceding the tournament has blossomed into an industry which experiments with college hoops coverage from a slightly different point of view.
Unfortunately, as with all experiments, sometimes things work out, and sometimes you destroy the lab. So someone needs to go in and clean up the mess, notify next of kin, and plead the grantwriters to let them keep their funding. (OK, now we’ve stretched the experiment thing a little too far.) More to the point, someone needs to actually READ all of this stuff and decide what’s good and what needs to make a first-round exit. That person is me. And if they can use gimmicks for their stories … well, as Ron Burgundy would say, when in Rome …
With that in mind, the theory here was simple – scour the major semi-sports coverage sites, find all of their tournament coverage (no matter how good or bad it was), and figure out a catchy way to weed out the good from the bad. Careful research whittled down the semi-sports coverage of March Madness to 17 deserving sources, divided up amongst the five major semi-sports sites (Page 2, CNNSI’s Scorecard Daily, FOX Funhouse, SPiN at CBS Sportsline, and Deadspin). And since we’re nothing if not lazy, a bracket was the obvious choice. Without further ado, Sports Media Watch and Below the Fold present the Semi-Sports Sweet Sixteen (click here for a downloadable PDF version):
Oh, right…how we’ll make our picks. We could give you some sort of scoring system which measures laughs, insight, writing ability, and other stuff, but that’s really not how we read these columns and we doubt you do either. Our methodology will be simple until it needs to be more than simple – which article did we like better? And, just as in the real tournament, the better column will survive and advance … and for our next piece, we’ll evaluate the continuing coverage of the tournament from those particular columns/sites. Eventually, we’ll have a winner – the semi-sports offering that actually brings what it promises – a funny, unique look at the NCAA Tournament that still provides insight in to the actual events.
With that … on to the games!! PLAY-IN GA…we mean, OPENING ROUND GAME:
16) B-Murph’s Tourney Rules vs. (17) Tim Keown’s March SadnessThis match up of Left Coast writers isn’t really fair. If this were the real tournament, Keown’s piece would be Oakland from 2005, a team that gets in with a losing record. It’s that bad. In his piece for Page 2 last Wednesday, he starts off by taking a risky position that I applaud – telling Duke haters to shut the hell up. But then he follows it with a piece that basically says, “Watch the tournament, but don’t enjoy it, at least not publicly.” Maybe, as my roommate would say, he should go back to Russia. I think I only included him in this so I could rail on this article. Brian Murphy, on the other hand, is positive, light handed, and writes like someone who actually enjoys sports. He asks us to love our home team and conference, respect our friends, and love the fact that one of the first days of the tournament is also St. Patrick’s Day. If were keeping score on this thing, there’s no question Murphy would blow Keown out. Winner: (16) B-Murph’s Tourney Rules. HOLY DEVOTION REGION OK, we liked B-Murph’s piece, we really did, but he’s a victim of seeding here. A fluff piece on how fantastic it is to cheer for your alma mater and get drunk with other Irish folk warms our heart, but it simply can’t stand up against the weight of work put in by tournament newcomer Deadspin. Will Leitch, Rick Chandler, and dozens of devoted readers put together “Three Tiny Tidbits” on all 65 teams in the tournament. Our personal favorite matchup was Memphis v. Oral Roberts, because it had a  little bit of everything – stats on the current teams, pop culture references that actually work, and jokes at the expense of a televangelist. You couldn’t ask for more. Time will tell if the site’s tournament coverage will be this solid throughout the rest of the tournament, but the sheer volume of work from Deadspin garnered them the top seed, and easy first round matchup. Winner: (1) Deadspin’s Pants Party. (8) Mike and Mike’s Marriage Madness vs. (9) Mr. and Miss Bracket
We wrote about Mike and Mike’s gig a few weeks ago, and we have to say, we’re disappointed with how it turned out. We hoped they would find a way to connect it to the tournament beyond the use of a bracket format, or played the rivalries of the prospective couples against one another, but no. They use sports as the pretext to discuss serious things, like families that don’t speak during certain seasons and the Katrina disaster. Not many laughs here, and nothing particularly entertaining. We expected better. Mr. and Miss Bracket isn’t a whole lot better, to tell the truth. Mary Buckheit and Jim Caple travel the country (seriously, does his wife in Seattle even know what he looks like anymore?) to find one guy and one gal who are so batshit crazy for their team, we’re willing to give them a crown to prove it. It’s a contest with prizes and rules, just like M&M’s deal, but at least the focus is on the love of sports and being a fan, rather than love of each other and being … well, engaged. Winner: (9) Mr. and Miss Bracket. CONSTANT COVERAGE REGION
Writing his Media Circus column for Scorecard Daily, Richard Deitsch gives his review of rival CBS’ opening night party in New York City. It’s an interesting read, as it details the sometimes rocky transition former coaches make when they leave the sidelines for the studio, all in the context of the media coverage of the tournament itself. It’s not quite the media analysis we try to do here, but manages to cover a lot of ground in few words. But the feverish response to the repetitive commercials aired by CBS was astounding. DJ Gallo, breaking from SportsPickle to help Page 2, describes what he learned during timeouts. Deadspin warns of the ads’ progeny. And that’s not even counting the bloggers, whose ears collective started bleeding during the 60 th running of the Cingular ads. These posts may not have had a lot to do with the games themselves, but they have everything to do with how we enjoy the games. And that’s enough to push these posts into the next round. Don’t worry, Richard; you’ll be back next year, we’re sure. Winner: (12) Post-Weekend Commercial Coverage. In this matchup, we see blogger vs. columnist, new school vs. old school. (No, Skip Bayless, that doesn’t mean you. Please go back to hell.) In one corner, we have a cadre of live bloggers. Deadspin did live coverage on Thursday and Friday afternoons with frequent funny posts. CNNSI’s Luke Winn stayed live all four days in Jacksonville, with hourly posts heavy with pictures and stats. Sportsline (though technically not through SPiN) coined the unfortunate term “glog” and had a blogger for each game. All were worth your while. Along side them, many columnists, including Dan Shanoff (who started this years ago) encouraged their readers to join open pools. All of these are efforts to include the reader in the writer’s viewing of the game. Now, in the other corner, we have Scoop Jackson. Scoop means well, and this is something a little different for him. We want to like it. And it’s not bad – we like the honest exchanges, both basketball related and not, between friends of odd nicknames. But by smooshing each day’s games into 800 words or less, somehow it ends up ringing a little hollow. It seems like he was stuck choosing between covering the entire weekend, or writing a column of reasonable length, and made the wrong compromise. We feel less included, and more like viewers. It was a good try … but ultimately falls short. Winner: (4) Tournament Blogs / Reader Pools.  BRACKET BREAKDOWN REGION
(6) El Hombre Knows His Brackets vs. (11) Trex Takes on the Play-In GameThis column would have been a lot easier had we simply seeded things to make for easy first round matchups, but this one is just ridiculous. El Hombre (who we’ll call by his name, Michael Bradley, if only because saying El Hombre repeatedly sounds dumb, but just saying Hombre sounds worse) takes on those who say that the mid-majors didn’t deserve at-large bids. Using arguments we hadn’t heard of before (did you hear about the MVC’s scheduling stunt with Gary Williams? Fear the Turtle indeed), Bradley easily defends the little guy’s right to play. Oh, and his picks for the tournament itself (and criticism of overseeded teams like Tennessee and Syracuse) were pretty good too. But Ethan Trex of CNNSI's Left Field was pretty solid himself. His beef wasn’t new … why should teams who won their conference tournaments be forced to play their way into the real NCAA Tournament … but his expression of it was excellent. Switching between the fan’s perspective (who wants more bubble teams when we can have more chances at upsets?) and the player’s (who wants to tell their grandkids their only NCAA Tournament game was on a Tuesday?), he makes the argument against the field of 65 about as well as we’ve heard it. In the end, El Hombre’s angles were a bit fresher, but this was a tough call. (3) The Tourney Preview of ClayNation vs. (14) Shanoff’s Annual Hot & Not ListShanoff is the Kentucky of this bracket – he wasn’t really all that impressive this year, but it wouldn’t feel right without him. As mentioned earlier, he created one of the first writer-reader tourney pools, and also was one of the first major media writers to blog the tourney’s opening rounds. I like to pick on Shanoff, but truth told, he was ahead of the curve in a lot of ways. His Hot & Not lists, however, have absolutely run out of steam. They were kind of funny a few years ago. Now, the jokes are predictable (yes, we know Ashley Judd is hot, now will you and Pat Forde please shut up?) and it’s tough to read them without thinking about how much of a Bristol shill Shanoff is the rest of the year. But with every death there is rebirth, and that rebirth is with SPiN’s Clay Travis. Using a similar approach, Travis’s ClayNation deals with the in and outs of the tournament both on and off the court, using a heavy dose of self-depreciating humor. We like self-deprecation here. It makes us feel better about our own dorkiness. We’re not saying it’s Pulitzer worthy stuff, but at least it doesn’t feel old. So, Dan Shanoff, it was fun, but leave your key on the way out. Clay Travis, welcome to the 2nd Round. OTHER PRIORITIES REGION
(7) Hofstettler Takes on the ‘Stache vs. (10) FOX’s Best Damn Hotties Bracket
I looked over FOX Funhouse high and low, and couldn’t find a legitimate piece of semi-sports media on the tournament. Not one. They don’t keep archives of Funhouse, and the only link to a legitimate tourney article goes out to their main college hoops section, so no dice there. Instead, we’re stuck with the Hotties bracket … which sucks mostly because it’s a cheap rip off of Page 2’s Hottest Female Athlete competition, which has been going on for five years. I don’t like ripoffs between the major semi-sports sites; that’s why SI on Campus’s “What If” bracket didn’t make the cut, since Page 2 did the same concept last year. But I needed something from FOX, so this is their automatic bid.
Meanwhile, Adam Hofstettler’s Uncommon Sense gets the job done back over at Scorecard Daily. There are few things that I enjoy more than putting current things into historical context. But for me, that’s usually confined to things like video games and Congressional spending. Hofstettler puts Adam Morrison’s wannabe ‘stache into its historical cellar behind such greats as Rollie Fingers, Keith Hernandez, and Marge Schott. I’m speechless. When you bring the funny to the hole this strong, you don’t need to even mention the games.
Winner: (7) Hofstettler Takes on the ‘Stache. (2) Sports Guy takes on his women vs. (15) The Steam Room’s Lottery Preview
Sports Guy has usually been good for some solid work around the first weekend of the tournament, like a few years back when his running diary of the first day’s games included his drunken disappointment when Holy Cross lost to Kansas. But college hoops has never been a big sport for him, and when back to back “More Cowbell” posts featured the picks of his buddy House and himself, plus the Sports Gal and the Sports Mom … well, you just knew this upset was possible, right? Leaving the potential sexism aside (I think his examples were fine, and others are reading too far into it), these were weak posts. It seemed like his attention was, understandably, on his longer NBA column for Friday. Well, if you are going to concentrate on the NBA, that’s fine … but if someone else can concentrate on the NBA and talk about the tournament effectively, well then, that’s a matchup you can’t win. The Steam Room’s Jason McIntyre over at SPiN does just that, breaking down the individual players on teams likely to make a decent run in the Dance, and noting how they might impact their draft position through big stats in the tournament. It’s light on stats, but does a solid job of balancing the needs of NBA lottery teams with the collegiate stars who might seem to fill those needs based on strong tournament play. We like analysis that crosses the lines between sport disciplines … though Mel Kiper, Jr. might be jealous. Winner: (15) The Steam Room’s Lottery Preview.
And there you have it. Next week - Deadspin’s pre-game coverage takes on the final stages of the Mr. and Miss Bracket Competition at Page 2. SPiN’s Steam Room tries to keep up its Cinderella run against the ever funny Uncommon Sense of Scorecard Daily. ClayNation and El Hombre battle in a Sportsline fight to the death. And we learn what really keeps us interested in the games – details from the games themselves, or jokes which completely (and freshly) trash the commercials in between. Maybe we’ll check in with writers who exited a little early. Most importantly, we’ll see if the semi-sports media can keep a good thing going with its complete NCAA Tournament coverage.
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