CBS Lets the Game Speak for Itself

Toward the end of Monday night’s NCAA championship game, when CBS’ Jim Nantz said, “We got the game we’ve longed for all season,” he presumably was talking about you and me.

But he could have also been talking about his employer. Connecticut’s upset victory over Duke was exactly what CBS wanted. It was exactly what CBS needed to boost sagging ratings.

And to CBS’ credit, it didn’t get in the way of a great game.

Just when it looked as though CBS might overdo such gimmicks as the computer-enhanced “virtual playbook” and give us too many cornball sayings such as “Get Ready Maggette” and “Rip Cords” and “Trey-Jans,” it pulled back.

Just when it looked as though CBS might show us every CBS star on its roster after showing us Ken Olin of “L.A. Doctors,” it gave us shots of John Wooden and H. Norman Schwarzkopf and Roger Clemens, or, as Nantz said, “A wizard, a general and a rocket.”

There were crowd shots of Christian Laettner and Grant Hill and Ray Allen, and that was fine.

Just when it looked as if CBS might show a zillion Craig Kilborn promos--his CBS show starts tonight--restraint was shown and there were only two Kilborn promos all night.

All CBS had to do to have a great night was not mess up, and it didn’t.

When you have Billy Packer, the best college basketball analyst who was working his 25th title game, and a solid play-by-play announcer like Nantz, you can only mess up by getting carried away. And CBS didn’t do that.

When there was a 20-second timeout toward the end of the game, CBS didn’t give us crowd shots and graphics. It stayed with the emotions of the players as they huddled on the sidelines.

“When you have a magical event like we did, you don’t want to fool with the magic,” Terry Ewert, CBS’ executive producer, said by phone after the game. “What we tried to do there during that 20-second timeout was show the emotion on the players’ faces, and we got more than we could have bargained for.”

Not that everything CBS and its announcers did was perfect, but if you look at the broad picture, it was almost as good a night for CBS as it was for Connecticut.

Host Greg Gumbel didn’t overstate things too much when he called it “a championship game for the ages.” After a few minutes of shoddy play in the beginning, it was a classic until the end.

During the opening, guest analyst Rick Majerus, the Utah coach who could be a broadcaster if he wanted to, said a faster pace would favor Duke. Regular analyst Clark Kellogg countered with, “I disagree. Pedal to the medal is the only way for UConn to win.”

The byplay set the tone for a balanced telecast.

When the game started, CBS gave us an overhead shot of the jump ball. Oh no, we feared, not those.

We didn’t see many overhead shots after that. Again, good restraint.

There were a few too many low-angle shots, but it could have been worse.

In the beginning, Packer seemed to talk too much, but once he found his stride, he basically told us only what we needed to know. Packer, at least when he’s on the air, rarely rants and raves about how great his buddies in the coaching profession are, as does a colleague who works for a cable network.

Packer sticks to the game, and that’s all we can ask.

He sees the game so well, and his comments are usually timely. But he did have one of those bound-to-happen things occur late in the first half. About one second after he said, “The officials aren’t calling [offensive] charges,” they called one on Duke’s Chris Carrawell for running into Connecticut star Richard Hamilton.

In the end, UConn fans were cheering loudly. CBS wasn’t cheering quite as loudly, but cheering nevertheless. Before Monday night’s game, CBS was averaging a 6.3 rating and a 14 share for the tournament, down 5% from last year.

CBS got the boost it needed Monday night.