It is not because my bracket's in the shitter. It is, and I'm plenty pissed about it. But the NCAA Men's Basketball Tournament will always be The Greatest Three Weeks In American Sport, and in time I will get over the fact that I lost in my pools again and look forward to March Madness. Happens every year.
However, this new TV deal CBS and Turner Sports has in covering the tournament sucks, big time. Not only is this postseason elegantly, almost perfectly, constructed, the way it's covered and broadcast was a moving work of art. Now, it has been destroyed, probably irrevocably. And that makes me hopping mad.
I had grave doubts about bringing in three cable networks so that every single game of the Big Dance, as they repeatedly say as a tagline, "can be seen in its entirety." So fucking what? A market was always designated a game with the most local interest, but unless Minnesota was playing here, CBS would inevitably shift us to a game that was close near the end, just to make sure we saw what would happen. March Madness, and CBS' coverage of it, was built on showing the wild finishes and buzzer-beaters and upsets. We got to see it all from the comfort of our Barcalounger, and we didn't have to miss a thing.
But this shit is way different. For the first round -- the "real" first round, not that play-in shit the NCAA insists on calling the "first round" now -- all 16 games on Thursday and Friday were spread out over four networks. Along with CBS, the other networks now carrying tourney games are TBS, TNT, and truTV. For a guy who doesn't have cable because he has, oh, priorities, I'm fucked. So are between 10 and 30 percent of the population that can't afford it.
What do you get? One game. The whole game. The whole goddamn, motherfucking game. Even if it's a blowout, you get that game -- "in its entirety!" CBS and Turner Sports chirpily say. Worst of all, they do not switch to more exciting games -- for the most part.
I am livid that I don't even understand a consistent policy from these guys. Sometimes, like with the, I believe, George Mason/Villanova game on Friday, the other networks did switch away from their contests (I was watching all the games at the same time because I was at a Hooters) to show it, although they shrunk the actual screen down in order to frame it with a title like "Live Look-In" and maybe, possibly show a sponsor. On the other hand, I was at home Thursday afternoon and noted the tight finish to the Morehead St./Louisville thriller. But since I didn't have cable, all I got was Kentucky/Princeton action. The only way I knew that the Eagles pulled off the upset was when the graphic that sits on the top of the screen for every single game you see showed the final.
Now how in the fuck is that better than switching to the final minutes of that game? Would it hurt ratings? Of course not. Would it hurt the, for lack of a better word, integrity of the new arrangement and the addition of Turner Sports covering some of the games? I don't think so. Instead I got a game that had no local interest and, even though it wound up being pretty good, was, I think, winding down the first half. We would've seen the last, like, four minutes of the upset of the Cardinals if it were a year ago. And the whole of College Basketball Nation would be buzzing about it. Now, a significant portion of the fanbase had no idea what happened until CBS ran an abbreviated, ten-second clip just after it happened. They couldn't show that live? What a joke.
The halftime shows and between-games patter is another problem created by the new TV deal. They used to be dominated by extended airings of games in progress, which was fucking awesome. But now we have, at least on the free TV side, Greg Gumbel and/or Ernie Johnson, Greg Anthony, Kenny Smith and Charles Barkley talking, talking, talking. Their analysis is fine; I am pleasantly surprised that the command Jet and Sir Charles have for the NBA translates to college b-ball (though I'm still irked they're just swooping in and telling us how it's going to be just as the Tournament starts). But I still want to see basketball! And it's there, on other channels, and they will no longer let us watch basketball!! That shit pisses me off, and I hope the vast majority of other people feel the same.
(Not as if this is the actual reaction to my rant, but I think the bigwigs at CBS and Turner will say, "Well, if you don't like it, change the channel." First of all, I don't fucking have cable. And second of all, if there are people like me who preferred it the old way, why in the hell aren't all four channels switching to basketball action? As much as I like the guys, I don't want three segments of studio talking heads breaking down what happened and what could happen. That's just bullshitting. I want b-ball, and I think others want b-ball, too. So, if I'm right, all you guys are losing rating by just having a studio show, right? Who's the dumb one now?)
The other thing that pisses me the fuck off is March Madness On Demand. Without cable, the only way I can see all the games are through my laptop. They've done it this way for years, but because CBS had always brought the action to me, I didn't need it. But now that they absolutely refuse to take shitty games off of our TV, I'm forced to watch through my computer. It's not a bad substitute ... if it works.
My modem at home is slow and kind of shitty. That means that, oftentimes, the game gets stopped because it can't stream or initialize or buffer or render or whatever the exact fucking word it's supposed to be. And I can't tell you how many fucking times a guy goes up for a shot only to see the goddamn screen freeze and that circle slowly trace itself counterclockwise. My connection's so bad that, at its worst, it happened about, oh, every 10-5 seconds.
The game would literally drag so it would be behind the point of the game in real time. If I did have cable and put it up on the TV, I'm sure what was on the computer would be late by about 15 seconds. Moreover, the computer screen had a running graphic showing the score and the time, and somehow that isn't synced up with the action. So, if the game I was watching kept freezing, I would know the actual score by looking up at the top of the screen instead of the game.
That produced some incredibly frustrating moments when close games came down to the wire. For the Butler-Pittsburgh and Arizona-Texas upsets, I was glued to my laptop ... until that goddamn circle started spinning around. The clock on the game broadcast was almost a minute after the clock shown on the graphic, so I knew there was a possibility that I would be able to see the score of the final before I saw how it played out on-screen. So I had to put my hands above my eyes to shield my line of vision from that graphic, like I was outside on a sunny day without my hate and wanted to reduce the glare to see what's in front of me.
Moreover, this screen has a twitter feed going on the lower-left hand corner. I didn't know if this reloaded as quickly as the graphic up top, but I didn't take any chances; at one point in the Arizona-Texas match, not only did I tilt my head down so as not to catch the score in the graphic, I put up my left hand to block my view of the twitter feed. It would have been pathetic to see what I looked like, squinting and leaning way close into my laptop just so I could see the game and just the game.
Luckily I didn't spoil myself; I saw the conclusions to both endings like they were in real time, although I'm absolutely convinced I could have seen the final score if I just looked up or down and to the left. Unfortunately, I still have Thursday and Friday where I'll need to keep up this self-seclusion in order to see the Sweet 16 games on TBS unspoiled.
I hate this new set-up, I hate it!!!
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