Every Tournament Game Is Available, for a Price

The changing face of the NCAA men’s basketball tournament was there on the television screen Sunday, answering questions from Chris Fowler during the middle of ESPN’s tournament selection show.

The face belonged to Bob Knight, longtime advocate of pure, simple and uncompromised basketball values, now decked out in a black sweater plastered with an advertisement for an automobile parts company.

Knight, longtime adversary of the American sports media, concluded the interview without a grimace or a cutting parting remark, but actually offered an amiable aside to Fowler and ESPN’s team of studio analysts.

“Let me just tell you guys at ESPN something that really comes from my heart,” Knight began. “You do a great job for college basketball. It’s something that I think all of us in college basketball really appreciate.”

Those waiting for the other shoe to drop didn’t have to bide time for long.

“And no one other than DirecTV does the kind of job for college basketball that you do,” added Knight, spokesman for DirecTV’s NCAA tournament subscription package. “So just make sure that you get the ‘Mega March Madness’ package from DirecTV.”

Welcome to the 2005 NCAA tournament, where old-school amateur innocence and exuberance find themselves seeded 16th against the sell-sell opportunism of top-seeded professional agenda.

Everyone, it seems, is trying to make some profit from the 64 teams of collegians left to compete for this year’s national championship. Office pools. Betting brackets. Special subscriptions to keep those NCAA updates coming on your mobile phone and laptop. Bigger and better ways to view the tournament, provided you keep your credit card handy.

DirecTV’s “Mega March Madness” program offers live access to all early-round games for $59.99.

For those with smaller budgets and broadband Internet access, CSTV.com offers “NCAA March Madness on Demand,” featuring live and on-demand streaming video of up to 56 tournament games, plus news conferences and real-time statistics, for $19.95.

CBS, offering tournament games for free but only a handful of them, is trying to find ways to combat the competition. For the moment, the best option the network has discovered is: Graphics! Graphics! Graphics!

Today and Friday, for example, CBS will be televising one game into a certain region while three others are being played. To keep those watching UCLA-Texas Tech updated on Illinois-Fairleigh Dickinson and the other evening games, CBS will keep three score boxes locked to the top of the screen.

“In the past we have rotated through scores of other games in a little box in the upper left-hand corner of our screen,” CBS Sports President Sean McManus said during a Tuesday conference call. “This year, [we have] come up with the idea of having all three games across the top of the screen, so you can in real time see exactly what’s happening in every other game during the first two days of the tournament. Scoring update, clock update and key statistics updated on a pretty regular basis.

“We’re also going to try to do more stats on the bottom of our screen. That was pretty popular during our football season this past year.... We’re going to try to update the pertinent individual and team statistics during the game also.

“We think that being able to keep track of every single game instantaneously is something that the fan probably would expect. So we’re going to deliver it to them this year.”

What CBS cannot deliver is the ability to select any game the viewer wants to watch. That is where DirecTV and CSTV.com hope to make inroads.

Brian Bedol, CSTV president and chief executive, said the idea for “NCAA March Madness on Demand” was “driven by the recognition that the tournament [has] so much going on simultaneously. Television has one game.... Everybody who I know who follows the tournament always complains that the game they really want to see isn’t the game that’s on. This way lets you follow whatever team or teams you’re following. You can now make sure you never miss a game.”

Bedol likens “Demand” to “being in the broadcast control room. It puts the viewer totally in control of the viewing.... [You] basically pick the game you want to watch. And while you’re watching the game, you actually can at the same time be watching the ‘game tracker’ of all of the other games going on, and switch back and forth between the different live games.

“You can have four windows open on your screen, three of them with the ‘game tracker’ product, one of them with live video.”

Which sounds similar to the CBS layout, except the viewer gets to select the live video.

Either way, that’s a lot of boxes on the screen. How many graphics and crawls can you add to the picture before boxing out the game altogether?

One positive offshoot of all this: In order to squeeze in action from as many games as possible, CBS has eliminated sideline-reporter interviews during the first two rounds.

McManus said that with “so much action going on simultaneously, we thought it was better to go to either live action or, as an alternative, highlights rather than the coaches interviews.... Other than injuries or something controversial happening, the basic role of a sideline reporter during the first two rounds is to [interview] one coach going into halftime and one coach going out of halftime. The coach almost never says anything that is memorable or significant.

“Why waste a minute listening to a coach when we could go back to the studio and hopefully pick up live action elsewhere?”

A good question, one that should have been asked and answered years ago.

At last, a bit of common sense emerging out of the madness.