Sports Media Watch presents thoughts on recent events in the industry, starting with the power conference dominance in the NCAA men’s basketball tournament and what it might mean for ‘March Madness.’
What would the end of Cinderella mean for March Madness?
In sports television, there is a tension between what is best for the fans and what is best for the networks. Every year, fans complain about leagues and networks focusing only on a handful of star players and big-market teams. When the Yankees and Dodgers met in the World Series, there were any number of social media denizens complaining about the pairing of baseball’s two best teams, who featured some of the biggest stars in the sport. In the NBA, there is always some grousing about the national attention given LeBron James’ Lakers and Stephen Curry’s Warriors.
Yet it is the Yankees and Dodgers, the Lakers and Warriors — the major brands — who move the needle most. When the World Series is Rangers-Diamondbacks, far fewer people watch.
Which brings the discussion to the NCAA men’s basketball tournament, which for the first time will feature a Sweet 16 comprised solely of teams from the “power” conferences. The NCAA men’s tournament is known perhaps best for its uncertainty, the Cinderella runs of teams like George Mason, VCU, Florida Gulf-Coast, Loyola Chicago and Saint Peter’s. Sometimes those teams get to the Final Four, other times just to the Sweet 16 or Elite Eight, but regardless of how long they last in the field, their bracket-busting feats tend to define the tournament for that year.
A tournament that is completely lacking those storylines is one that loses much of its charm.
Yet one would be hard-pressed to find any complaints at CBS or TNT Sports about this year’s tournament, wherein the only double-digit seed remaining is an SEC squad coached by John Calipari. Sans-Cinderella, the second week of the tournament has turned into the biggest gathering of elites outside of Davos — stacked with star-studded programs in matchups that would be tantalizing at any point of the season. Duke-Arizona, Auburn-Michigan and Kentucky-Tennessee highlight the Sweet 16. The Elite Eight may well pit Duke against Alabama and Michigan against Michigan State. The Final Four? How about Duke-Kentucky and Florida-Michigan? To top things off, maybe a Michigan-Duke title game, or Kentucky against Calipari?
There are of course no sure things with sixteen teams remaining, and the final could well feature lower-profile matchups. Nonetheless, it is impossible to imagine that the networks are not at least cautiously optimistic that this year’s Final Four will mark a reprise of 2022, when Duke faced North Carolina in the most-watched national semifinal since 2017.
What is a feast for the networks is a cause for concern among observers of the sport. The dominance of the power conferences may be good for ratings in the short term, but what does it mean for the future of college sports? What does it mean for the future of the tournament, which it should be noted provided far fewer compelling, exciting games in the first two rounds than is typical? Will the men’s tournament start to resemble the women’s, where the second week features titanic matchups, but the first week is riddled with routs?
It is worth noting that just a year or two ago, the concern about the men’s tournament was the randomness of the results, with the “one and done” era having resulted in a greater number of low-profile teams making deep runs. Now, it is NIL that has sounded the death knell of those mid-major teams, instead paving the way for dominant power conference schools. The concerns about the state of the game are rarely stable.
The question is whether those concerns are meaningful for the networks, or even for the majority of viewers. While Cinderella is synonymous with March Madness, the power conference schools tend to draw the most viewers. The underdog teams are not necessarily a drag on the ratings — Florida Atlantic-San Diego State drew a healthy audience in the Final Four two years ago — but the numbers rarely ‘pop’ with those teams in the field.
The power programs are more familiar to the casual fanbase that makes up most of the March Madness audience, just as in the NBA, baseball and every other sport. If March Madness becomes a little less mad, there is a very strong possibility that the networks and majority of viewers will approve.
Yes, that means losing something special and irreplaceable, all in the name of ratings, money and influence. For all the sentimentality surrounding this tournament, from “One Shining Moment” to tearful postgame press conferences, March Madness is a television show. If given the choice between this year’s field and something more eclectic, the powers that be will choose this year every single time.
MLB wants more from national TV than it is willing to give
The Major League Baseball season began last Tuesday, though one could be forgiven for overlooking a 6 AM ET (3 AM PT) season opener played half a world away. The defending champion Dodgers opened their title defense with a 4-1 win over the Cubs from Tokyo, Japan, the first of a two-game series that preceded the rest of the regular season by more than a week. The viewership was healthy enough — few would complain about averaging more than 800,000 viewers for a game that started so early — but nobody would argue that MLB maximized its potential audience.
Consider how the other “Big Four” leagues begin their seasons. In the NFL, the defending champion hosts its annual Kickoff Game in primetime on NBC. In the NBA, the defending champion hosts the season opener in primetime on TNT (and starting this fall, NBC). In the NHL, the defending champion hosts a primetime game on ESPN.
Not so in baseball. For years, MLB did start its season with a primetime, standalone showcase on ESPN, but the league has largely gone away from that since moving the start of the season to midweek. MLB has done good work in creating event programming such as games at Field of Dreams and Rickwood Field, but it has been mostly lax in setting aside the kind of high-profile, season-opening and holiday matchups that are a hallmark of other leagues.
That is in keeping with the league’s broader approach that views national media partners less as collaborators in the game’s growth and more as expendable platforms secondary to local television. As long as MLB continues to treat national TV as an afterthought, so too will national TV respond in kind.
Plus: Bob Costas, MNF, March NBA, George Foreman
Famed broadcaster Bob Costas was the guest on the latest edition of the Sports Media Watch Podcast, and over the course of a nearly 90-minute conversation opined on everything from the end of his play-by-play career on TBS last season to his relationship with NBC, which he hinted could be close to some level of reconciliation. Costas was also open about the state of journalism and sports television. You can listen to the episode below on Apple Podcasts or on Spotify.
ESPN has dramatically improved its Monday Night Football broadcast with the additions of Joe Buck and Troy Aikman, but the constant changes behind the scenes — the network is going with a fourth-different director in a decade, and a third-different one in four seasons of the Buck-Aikman era — are not exactly a sterling sign.
The most charitable interpretation is that ESPN, after years of mediocrity on its highest-profile broadcast, has reached the point where merely ‘good’ is not good enough. The least-charitable is that even after three years, the fit of Buck and Aikman is still awkward enough to require the services of a Fox veteran in the director’s chair. The on-air product is polished enough that the latter interpretation seems unlikely; then again, it is also polished enough that it did not seem any changes were required.
In The Athletic, NBA writer Eric Koreen has dubbed March the worst time of the NBA season. It is hard to disagree, as the league’s best teams muddle through injuries and its worst teams play out the string. The quality of play in March has thus far been an easy problem to overlook, as the NBA is largely off of national television this time of year due to March Madness. That is unlikely to be the case starting next season, when the new media rights deals begin. There is no reason to believe that NBC will take Sunday nights off during March Madness, or that Peacock and Amazon will go dark the way that TNT and even ESPN tend to this time of year. There could be a lot of national television exposure for the dog days of the season next year.
George Foreman’s death last week takes the sports world one step further away from the glory days of boxing. There are few events in sports television with the electricity of a big fight, and that was even the case for last year’s fairly absurd pairing of a 58-year-old Mike Tyson and a YouTube influencer. Yet no sport has fallen as far off of the national agenda as boxing, whose stars were at one time among the most famous athletes in all of American popular culture. From Foreman — who parlayed his fame into a career as one of the nation’s foremost pitchmen — to Ali and Tyson, boxers were entertainers, cultural critics, main characters in the national story. Now one would be hard-pressed to know any of their names.
