Year seven of the CBS Sports/Turner Sports partnership for the NCAA Division I Men’s Basketball Championship is underway this week, as live coverage of all 67 games will run across four national television networks – TBS, CBS, TNT and truTV. With the First Four getting underway tomorrow, the staple event will this year see CBS broadcast the NCAA Final Four National Semifinals on April 1, before the National Championship on April 3.
Commanding March Madness once again will be Greg Gumbel, who will mark year 20 as host of the tournament, and 25th overall. Cynopsis Sports spoke with Gumbel about the occasion, favorite memories and how Turner took the target off his back.
Gumbel on favorite memories: There are certainly memories that stick out, whether it’s the endings of certain games and certainly last year’s is going to be tough to top. The thing that strikes me the most is the number of names that pop up at the next level on the professional side after you’ve seen them play in the tournament. You say, ‘Oh, I remember that and he was good,” etc. It is fun to see the transitions that these kids make, and you call them kids until you stand next to them and they are about a foot and a half taller than you are. But I think for me, because most of our analysts are former players, for me the intrigue of the tournament is from the little guys rising up. Even if they don’t win, you can appreciate the level of play they give rising up to perform against all odds. Probably the one that stands out the most for me was George Mason, which went all the way to the final four.
On the ultimate Cinderella: I often argue with Clark Kellogg that a 16 seed is going to beat a 1 seed one of these days in the first round of the tournament. He’ll say that won’t happen, but I say of course it will, even if we may not live to see it. I say this because basketball is a game where you either bring your jump shot to the gym, or you don’t. If you find that four or five guys on a team can’t hit the broadside of a barn in a given game, you can get beat that night. It doesn’t always happen, in fact for a 1 versus 16, it has never happened, but I believe it will happen one day.
On play-by-play: It is a monumental task, While this is my 20th year as host of the tournament, it is my 25th overall. My first five years, I did play-by-play and I can tell you that for one broadcast team to do four games in one day in an unbelievable challenge. All the numbers start to look the same by around 10pm, all the players start to look the same. You start asking yourself if this particular player is on the current team on the air or the one two games ago. It is fun but also a truly tiring event and it is a difficult thing to make sure that you are keeping everything separate.
On complaints: Things have fortunately changed with the arrival of Turner into the mix. I used to get all the grief whenever we decided to switch an audience from one game to another. Who was the easiest person to shout at? Greg Gumbel at CBS. I used to get all these calls on voicemail and some of them were not pretty. If you take a Kentucky viewing audience away from a Kentucky game with a minute and a half remaining and Kentucky has a 30 point lead, they are still pissed off. What I used to do was take those calls and forward them to Sean McManus, and he would then come up to me and ask me to stop forwarding those calls. Anyway, people would always think that I was the guy who made those decisions.
On preparation: I don’t think you can mesh my work with the NFL and college basketball, so I don’t really start preparing until after my NFL work is completed. Seth Davis and Clark Kellogg, however, have no such parameters and they can follow it from day one and they do. Believe it or not, with all the of notes our terrific research department provides us and all of the newspaper articles, the best education I get is listening to guys like Clark and Seth talk about it. I know right away when we get to halftime what the hot buttons are and what their opinions are and my job is to get them to say it. It is incumbent upon me to know enough to speak intelligently with these guys. The best thing I can do is pay attention to them and talk about what strikes them as being the most important.
