When March Madness begins today, some viewers may think they are watching ESPN instead of CBS.
For the third straight year, ESPN personalties will play a heavy role on CBS’ NCAA Tournament coverage. ESPN mainstay Jay Bilas, handling CBS duties for the fifth time in six years, will be on the #2 announcing team for CBS, working with Dick Enberg or Carter Blackburn. Fellow ESPN colleague Len Elmore will work on the #4 team with Gus Johnson, and Bill Raftery — who splits time between CBS and ESPN all season long — will spend time on the #3 team with Verne Lundquist.
As a result, ESPN personalities will be the lead analysts on three of the top four CBS broadcast teams, including three of the four Regional Finals. This was the case for the past three years as well, begging the question of whether CBS has much confidence in its own announcers if it must bring in talent from other networks to work the biggest games.
When handling as many games as CBS broadcasts during the NCAA Tournament, it is not unusual for a network to bring in talent from its rivals. TNT frequently used NBC announcers for NBA Playoff games in the early part of this decade, while ESPN and NBC were cozy enough during their Major League Baseball partnership in the 1990s that Bob Costas worked two regular season games on ESPN in 1999.
None of this is possible without a very cordial relationship between the two networks involved. In the past several years, CBS and ESPN have had a generally amicable relationship regarding college basketball, with the most obvious example coming five years ago, when the War in Iraq forced March Madness off of CBS in place of war coverage. Instead of airing early round games on corporate sibling TNN (the predecessor to Spike TV), CBS loaned the games to ESPN. The games were still produced by CBS, and used CBS announcers.
A similar arrangement was reached last week, as ESPN2 aired CBS coverage of the SEC Tournament. That arrangement was more surprising than the one in 2003; unlike five years ago, CBS now has a CBS Sports-branded college sports network on which it could have aired the game.
The cooperation between CBS and ESPN benefits both. CBS gets a strong slate of announcers, while ESPN indirectly gets validation that its college basketball production is the best on television.
