CBS Is Drawing a Blank So Far

So here’s Marquette in one corner, yammering about the good old days of 1977, which causes Texas, which had been nodding off since the football talk stopped, to perk up and mutter something about Earl Campbell’s Heisman year.

Over there, the Kansas guy keeps looking at his watch, because he has to catch a plane headed for North Carolina and, oh, there he goes, right out the door, because the whining old bore from Syracuse just showed up, and who invited him, anyway?

This isn’t a Final Four, it’s Thanksgiving with the second cousins after the A-list dined and dashed.

And CBS will be televising it, in prime time, during wartime, and hoping somebody watches.

Ratings were down more than 20% during the first four rounds of the NCAA tournament, which network officials attribute to a national audience concerned with ongoing events in Iraq. Hoping for an upturn at the Final Four, CBS last weekend watched and grimaced as Arizona, Duke and Kentucky were eliminated in the regionals, producing a national semifinal field consisting of a program that peaked a generation ago (Marquette), another old-time power that could soon lose its coach (Kansas), a football school (Texas) and Jim Boeheim’s seen-it-already act (Syracuse), which is 0 for 2 on the big stage.

“I think you could say all four that are assembled here are Cinderellas,” CBS play-by-play broadcaster Jim Nantz said Thursday during a conference call from New Orleans.

“I don’t care that Texas was a No. 1 seed [in the South Regional]. Texas has no modern-day history of ever being put in this position right here, playing on this large a stage in basketball. Even though they’re a No. 1 seed, I think Texas becoming the national champion on Monday night would be very Cinderella-like.

“I think that you could say no one expected Marquette to emerge from Minneapolis last week out of the teams that had made it to the [Midwest] Regional.

“And then out West, if people would have said, ‘Hey, rank them, one through four, the teams in Anaheim,’ Kansas would have been the third choice. More people would’ve said Arizona and Duke, even though Duke was a 3 and Kansas was a 2. No one was talking up Kansas. Even with the [Big 12 Conference] regular-season championship. This is not Roy Williams’ best team. It would be Cinderella-like for Kansas to win a championship.

“I think all four of these teams have an underdog mentality going into the games this weekend.”

So does CBS Sports, which realizes its place during a war that began the night before the basketball tournament.

Talking about the potential audience for this weekend’s Final Four, Nantz said, “It’s difficult to gauge ... because as you know, with everybody preoccupied, as we all should be, with what’s going on over in Iraq, ratings are down for the tournament, etc.

“So it’s going to hard to say, ‘Wow, people didn’t latch onto this year’s Final Four.’

“Looking at the entire body of work for the tournament, people have their interests divided, as you would expect people would. I know I do.

“But as a storyteller ... I love and relish the opportunity to have a new kid on the block and a story to tell that hasn’t been told before on a national level. And I think Texas gives us an abundance of stories to tell.

“The same thing applies, really, to Marquette. I grew up watching Dean Meminger and Coach McGuire and Bo Ellis and Maurice Lucas and all those storied Marquette teams. But what Marquette did in the 1970s is lost on a great many people today. As odd as this may sound, the younger generation looks at Marquette like they would Butler or Gonzaga. They’re saying, ‘Wait a minute, now I know Marquette is from a major conference, or from Conference USA,’ but they have not been part of the national landscape in a long, long time.

“This is a really great group of individuals too, and I look forward to telling those stories about the Golden Eagles.”

TV Hoop Dreams

If the equation for healthy ratings is geographic balance plus tradition plus name recognition, what would be television’s dream Final Four?

Neal Pilson, former president of CBS Sports, imagines it would be “probably Duke, Kentucky, you might have Kansas in there, and UCLA maybe.

“You know, everybody would differ on that. You might say, ‘Well, gee, Duke and Kentucky come kind of from the same neck of the woods, but they’re both traditional schools with a national following.’ I guess 10 people, you’ll get 10 different answers to that question.”

Pilson describes this year’s field as “not perfect, but OK ... I think it’s a pretty good geographic balance.

“You’ve got Texas coming out of the Southwest, a big state. You’ve got Syracuse coming out of New York and the Big East. You want representation there. You’ve got Marquette coming out of the upper Midwest -- though not a Big Ten team. I think if you were really looking to maximize ratings you probably would have preferred Michigan State or Michigan or Indiana or Illinois or something like that. But, you know, you don’t get to pick those teams.

“And you’ve got Kansas, which is the center of the country, middle America and a traditional basketball power. So it’s OK. You don’t have a West Coast representative, but you can’t have everything. And you don’t have a traditional southern school coming out of the SEC, but you have strong representation from the Northeast, the Midwest and the Southwest. And that’s good.”

From a ratings perspective, Pilson said he believes this year’s tournament “will be an asterisk. This year is an aberration. The war started on the day the tournament opened up.

“I predicted then, and it certainly has come to pass, that a tremendous amount of Americans, not surprisingly, are a lot more concerned about the progress of the war, where young Americans are dying, compared to the tournament, where young Americans are losing games and going home.

“There is a quantum degree of importance here. I don’t think anybody’s arguing to the contrary.”

Attention Divided

Pilson said his interest in the tournament has been similar to that of “most Americans. I haven’t gotten as involved in the tournament as I usually do. I had to think long and hard who the Final Four was -- and I’m going.

“The tournament is like a movie. There’s a beginning, a middle and an end. And if you miss the beginning, as I did, it’s hard to come in in the middle.

“And while ratings have improved relative to last year, that first weekend, for the tournament, was just an unfortunate confluence of things happening at the same time. I just watched a lot of war coverage on Saturday and Sunday and didn’t watch a lot of the tournament.

“I don’t feel quite as involved in the tournament this year as I have in the past. And I’m very involved. Because I was the guy who brought the tournament to CBS in 1981.”

Packer: Memo to UCLA

CBS college basketball analyst Billy Packer on UCLA’s hiring of Ben Howland:

“Whether it’s Ben Howland or whoever, I think it’s time for the UCLA program to say, ‘Hey, look, there have been fellas that followed Coach Wooden ... all kinds of different coaches ... [and] the college basketball scene is never going to be like it was under Coach Wooden’s reign again.’

“I think UCLA fans, their alumni, their administration have got to see that and respect that. And in Ben Howland’s case, he’s proven that he can put together a winning program and a winning team and somebody’s just got to say, ‘He’s got our undivided support and we’re going down the road and UCLA is going to be what UCLA can be.’ And hopefully in Ben’s case, he can maximize the performance of his program and his team.

“They’ve been jumping around now for 20 years, and it’s time to come to grips with that.”

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Larry Stewart is on vacation.