March Sadness
What a travesty! First that both West Virginia and Gonzaga lost. But even worse… the over excited crap that the CBS announcers spilled out for UCLA. “Climb the Mountain”? Come on guys. This was not the greatest game of all time. This was a UCLA team who had a horrible first 15 minutes of a game and Gonzaga let them come back. Who was the underdog here? And bad officiating too at the end. Just silliness. I hate it. And even worse is that I have to watch it on CBS. Every year it’s the same problem. I get to watch only part of all the games because CBS is one channel and they schedule the games such that they overlap quite a bit. We get the Gumble interuption and cut over. Greg Gumble — give me a break. I get annoyed anytime I see him or hear him. To me, he’s the icon of bad network sports coverage. Contrast the tournament with ESPN’s coverage of the women’s tournament. Pick any game in the women’s tournament and you can watch it on one of ESPN’s channels. It’s full coverage with annoucers who are better and an in-studio crew who really know what they are talking about. ESPN’s women’s tournament coverage is the standard. It’s what we deserve for the men’s tournament.
I’d like to see the men’s tournament opened up big-time. No more exclusive rights. We should be able to watch any game of the tournament in full. In fact, this anti-exclusive idea should really be used in the Olympics. Networks should be able to bid on individual events. You want to watch swimming, well, that’s on NBC while ABC has full coverage of the men’s 100 meter hurdles and ESPN is showing the women’s marathon. Instead we get this highlight stuff where we’re carted all over to various venues and shown only what they think we might want to see and always teasing us with what will be coming up later.
There are hundreds of channels and only one channel is showing the tournament games? In this satellite and cable era this just seems absurd. For the SEC tournament, every game was broadcast (if you had satellite) via alternate channels. It was a wonderful thing. I could actually choose which game I was going to watch. Imagine that!
March 26th, 2006 at 12:42 pm
March Sadness is right.