CBS Delivers Championship Coverage

If we heard it once, we heard it a dozen times from Billy Packer in Monday night’s national championship college basketball game between two tenacious Wildcats teams. Kentucky had never seen this much speed before, he said. And, as usual, the most perceptive game analyst in the sport was right again.

“Kentucky has not faced five guys who get down the floor like this,” Packer said not long after the opening jump ball. “The pace favors Arizona.”

As it turned out, Arizona had to keep up that tongue-dragging pace for 45 minutes, what with overtime. And in the end, after the score had been tied 16 times and the lead had changed 18 times, Kentucky, the defending national champion, simply wore out.

Still, there couldn’t have been a viewer in America who minded staying up a few minutes longer to watch one of the most compelling games in Final Four history on CBS. And lead play-by-play man Jim Nantz and Packer complemented each other superbly, as usual.

Still, we’ve got to pick a few nits.

The cliche meter was off the charts from the start, especially in the superfluous pregame show hosted by Pat O’Brien. He told us at various times it was time “to crown a champion,” that Arizona was “the new kid on the block” and that it also was time “to put an exclamation point on college basketball.”

It may be time to get a new writer, too, unless that drivel was all Pat’s idea.

Studio analyst Clark Kellogg, a very perceptive fellow throughout the tournament, must have taken his cue from O’Brien when he advised viewers, “It’s time for marquee guys to step up.” Still, we loved his description of Kentucky’s Ron Mercer as “like a king in checkers, he can make moves that no other pieces can.”

Duke Coach Mike Krzyzewski also was throwing around the coachspeak, offering an early warning in the pregame show that despite the tenacity of Kentucky’s furious full-court pressure “Arizona is legit. They’ve been in the pressure cooker before.”

The same crew came back at the half, with a bonus guest. That would be John Wooden, the fabled coach of 10 national title teams at UCLA, 22 years after his retirement following the ’75 team’s championship season.

With all the ex-coaches and former players out there masquerading as so-called experts, it’s a wonder Wooden never had a chance to work regularly at the network or major cable level. More than two decades out of the game, the man still knows his basketball, and the studio crew treated him with the deference he clearly deserves.

Asked about the kind of players he wanted in his program, Wooden said: “I wanted the players who were quicker at their position than the other man. I wanted players who would look for the pass first.”

And could he still dominate in today’s game, O’Brien wondered?

“Oh no, mercy sakes,” Wooden said. “I was in the right time at the right place.”

The same also could be said for CBS’ production on Monday night. With only one game being played, gone (forever we can only hope) was that incomprehensible split screen box used in earlier rounds. The dominant camera angle came from exactly where you wanted it, a view from the middle of the court about 30 rows up, with the ball almost always in sight, back court to front court.

All the proper replays were shown from a nice variety of angles, and the graphics were presented in type large enough to see even without glasses. The most startling stat of the night, in fact, was a graphic showing Arizona as having the best winning percentage of any Division I school in America for the past 10 years.

There were a few other semi-annoyances, though at least Nantz stopped referring to Arizona as “Zona,” as he did earlier in the tournament. Was that Minni, or Sota in the semis? Carol, or Ina?

In a national title game, with a huge audience containing some relative newcomers to college basketball, all the hoop-junkie jargon about spotting up, double downs and dribble penetration kick-outs must have sounded like ancient Greek to some viewers.

Similarly, Nantz kept referring to the 16-minute timeout, the eight-minute timeout, the four-minute timeout. Just call them what they really are -- TV timeouts built into the game so CBS and anyone else who airs college basketball can make a buck. And on the same subject, it also might have been nice to tell viewers how many regular timeouts and 20-second timeouts are allowed per team per half.

Other than those minor complaints, CBS clearly rose to the occasion of this classic final. Fabulous game, terrific coverage, and a worthy champion that ran away with a national title, just the way Billy Packer said it would, right from the start.