Five ways CBS could enhance the Big Dance

Michael Hiestand of the USA Today shares with us "Five ways CBS could enhance the Big Dance." Let's take a look at Mr. Hiestand's suggestions, shall we?

Yes, it's great all CBS games are shown live online — complete with a handy "boss button" that makes a generic spreadsheet appear when The Man snoops around — as well as on satellite TV provider DirecTV. It's handy that CSTV, the CBS-owned cable channel, will now have two first-round games viewers won't get on their local CBS station.

But let's go further. CSTV should replay all games, or at least daytime games so viewers can see them after they get home.

Nice thought but I don't even know if I get CSTV. How many homes could it possibly be in? Here's what I'd like to see... March Madness in 60 available for download from iTunes. MSG cuts out all the timeouts and breaks between whistles and edits Knicks and Rangers games down to 60 minutes. How great would it be if CBS did the same and made it available on iTunes? We can't all get away from our desks to watch the game. I'd gladly pony up $1.99 to watch the game on my iPod or laptop on the train ride home. You can't tell me CBS wouldn't rake it in on this one.

On NFL studio shows, analysts make game picks and viewers see their season records. Let's get brackets from CBS' Clark Kellogg and Seth Davis, so viewers see if they're doing better in their brackets.

And while studio segments are best devoted to highlights or taking viewers for look-ins on other games they aren't getting, CBS could liven things up with some cameos. How about bringing the stars of the highest-rated NCAA final — Magic Johnson and Larry Bird — for a drop-by to talk about which tournament teams today could have matched up to their college teams?

Really? Who cares what Clark Kellogg and Seth Davis' brackets look like? I don't have five brackets of my own to keep track of? I do care what Bob from accounting has on his sheet though. And you can't compare this to NFL picks during the season - they come back every week for another 16 games. Clark and Seth make a few bad picks or there's a few too many upsets in the first two rounds and you've got nothing to talk about in that segment. How about briging in the person with the current best sheet at the start of the day on cbs.sportsline and get the fans perspective on their picks and why they made them. Likely a lot more interesting than what some "expert" is going to server up for us.

CBS rarely makes major changes to its on-air lineup; this year's only change is James Brown replacing Craig Bolerjack as a play-by-play announcer — but it could mix things up more in the course of airing 63 games.

Last year, CBS pursued Dick Vitale to call some early-round action, but ESPN essentially said he was a franchise player and nixed the idea.

A novel way CBS could build a little extra buzz someday: Use a woman as a play-by-play announcer.

Um, no. Let's just move on...

CBS' college football coverage included taped "rants" from hard-core fans, and ESPN has put cameras in college student sections. This is college sports; it's OK to be a little goofy.

How about occasional shots from a camera mounted on a mascot? It'd be as good as the umpteen shots of coaches, although CBS understandably focuses on them, given that longtime coaches are better known than virtually all of the players.

Yeah, that's what I want to see when I'm drunk and nauseated by my piss-poor bracket next Saturday afternoon... a shot from the head of the Stanford Fir Tree bobbing around in HD on my 50" plasma. Motion sickness anyone?

Billy Packer needs to feel freer to admit when he's wrong. And his partner, Jim Nantz, should spice things up by challenging Packer more often.

Let's rephrase that, "Billy Packer needs to feel freer to admit when he's wrong." Ahh, now isn't that better?

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Harvey Araton kills Billy Packer!

Harvey Araton gets us warmed up with a nice brace yourself for NCAA coverage column in today's New York Times

NEW RULE Billy Packer must stop acting as if he deserves community-service credit for grilling some N.C.A.A. bureaucrat on the Sunday selection show.

Guess what, Billy? The selection people can choose whichever teams they want, even if you don’t approve — probably because one of your coaching buddies didn’t get in, or get the seeding he thought he deserved. That’s why they call it the N.C.A.A. tournament, not the Billy Packer Invitational.

Packer would argue that his annual diatribe is just the result of a broadcast journalist doing his job, as if he would ever use his network forum to tackle real college basketball issues. Rather than dissect graduation rates and cheating programs, Packer loves to blame the N.B.A. for raiding the talent pool. He bashes it for being corporate and cutthroat, for demanding that taxpayers in tight-budget cities build luxury-box-endowed arenas — somehow forgetting who foots the bill for the construction of state university arenas and those state-of-the-art weight rooms and study centers.

Packer was better years ago, when he was Al McGuire’s straight man. CBS needs a younger, hipper, less-entrenched lead analyst (someone like Greg Anthony) to bring its coverage into the 21st century.

Time for that self-important shill to pack it in.

Don't you just love it when a columnist doesn't pull any punches? The great thing about this column for me is that Araton isn't even the Time's media critic. Way to set us up for the tourney Harvey!

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Bill Simmons hates Billy Packer

Sometimes I feel like I come up with an idea for a website and there's Bill Simmons talking about it but, that's what makes him such an entertaining writer... he thinks like his readers. Here's a brief rant on Billy Packer that he posted to his blog today.

... but have you noticed that Packer somehow turns himself into a major story before EVERY NCAA TOURNAMENT? As I wrote a couple of years ago, I was watching an Indiana State Final Four game from the '79 tournament and they made a big deal before the game about how Packer had publicly attacked Indy State's credentials for the entire tournament, and now they were in the Final Four and he was eating a little crow -- they even showed an awkward interview with him and Larry Bird after the game. This was 28 years ago!!!!!! What chain of events needs to happen for CBS to replace him with a more palatable, more enjoyable, agenda-less lead analyst? Does 100 percent of the country have to band together and say, "We're tired of this guy?" Or are we good at the current number of 97 percent?

That's why this site is here. To give people a place to come together and vent about the crap the TV networks make us put up with. Let's band together like Bill says and let the world know how we feel about Bill Packer.

UPDATE: Here's a great rant by one of our readers in the Sportscaster Forums.