Make it stop!  Please, will somebody make it stop?  I know they paid like 6 billion dollars (yes, that’s BILLION) for the rights for 11 years but CBS with the NCAA Men’s basketball tournament is like a fish with a bicycle – no one knows how he got it and he sure doesn’t know what to do with it!

                      [How does it pedal?  Where is it going anyway?]

I’ve been following college hoops since I was a wee lad.  The first time I ever filled out a pool sheet I was 11.  I took 3^rd place in my mother’s office pool and won $40.  I haven’t won a dime since but we’re not here to talk about me!  I’m just trying to point out that my history with the NCAA stretches back a long way.  What I want to know is in this era of brilliant innovation in sports coverage from the first and ten line to the mini-cameras shoved in every nook and cranny,  why is one of the premiere sporting events of the year being run by a director who by all accounts is a chimp that got hold of a clicker?

                                              
                [Actual picture of the CBS Tournament Director checking the wiring.]

I’m not denigrating the men and women who are covering the individual games for CBS (except Billy Packer who would have to double his excitement level just to get up to “bored”).  I’m talking about whoever is back at master control making the decisions about when to switch from game to game, the scheduling and the new rules for commercial insertion.

Let’s take the last one first.   Like it’s not hard enough for us sports junkies, mostly men, to convince our wives that we just have to watch the end of this game and then we will “take out the garbage/clean up the yard/do the dishes” or whatever deal we made to get away with watching 48 hours of basketball in one weekend.  But now the typical stereotype that’s always thrown in our faces: “oh, the last 2 minutes is going to take 25 real minutes” is actually true!  When did the rules change so that every single, solitary timeout demands an automatic minute and a half commercial break?  I guess you have to make your 6 billion back somehow but the sequence of  foul shot – timeout – commercials – 5 second rush up the court – timeout – commercial – foul – timeout – commercial – foul shot – timeout – commercial (you get the point) is literally making it true!  One of the tight games last weekend took literally 5 minutes to complete the last 23 seconds.   Not only did it kill all the tension and drama but it made me want to actually get up and take out the garbage!   Would it kill them to leave it at the arena every other timeout in the last minute? Is that too much to ask?

                                               

The scheduling is probably a joint effort between CBS and the NCAA but who’s the genius who decided that with 8 games on the schedule, the best way to divide them would be 1 game early, then 4 games then 3 games?  You couldn’t start 2 games early?  Well in an effort to get more Sunday prime time they did the 1/4/3 split and what happened?  All 4 games in the middle (or at least 3 of 4, I don’t remember) all went down to the wire.  The staggered start of those games blew up because one of them went to O.T..  So what did the chimp with the clicker in master control do?  We missed the end of regulation in the game that went to o.t. because they didn’t cut there fast enough.  Then we got to see the middle of the o.t. and they didn’t switch back to the end of EITHER of the other two games in their last 20-30 seconds (probably  because they were in one of 17 commercial breaks).  So we missed pretty much every exciting moment from that slate.  And of course the late games were all 20 point blowouts. 

[Even Japanese Scientists can't tell you what happened Sunday afternoon]

To add insult to injury, the single game at noon was the matchup of two major upset winners:  Villanova, a 12 seed, and tiny Siena from just outside of Albany.  It was a pretty good game but ‘Nova had it in hand down the stretch.  But did they really have to cut away from the game with 2 minutes left?    Here’s a bunch of kids who will probably NEVER be on national t.v. again and you have to rob them of their last two minutes?  It’s these random schools that make the first weekend of the tournament as great as it is.  I know it was critically important to see the sequences that led to Texas taking a 7-2 lead over Miami with 37 minutes left to play but come on…

Now let’s discuss the first point, the actual cuts.  Once upon a time, when sanity still had some place in tournament coverage, you could actually show a split screen!  My god what a concept!  TWO GAMES ON THE SCREEN AT THE SAME TIME?  I know, seems technically impossible in these primitive days when we can send a satellite probe to friggin’ Pluto but they used to actually be able to accomplish this!  So if they were switching from one game to another they’d have them both up at the same time, wait until the original game hit a commercial break or a natural break in the action and then go to full screen on the new game.  Now?  They just cut whenever the chimp feels like hitting the button.  In last weekend’s Sunday afternoon debacle they actually cut away from a game while a 3 point shot WAS IN THE AIR!  I’ll never know if it went in or not.  The lack of closure is killing me!

[This thing is actually exploring the rings of Saturn right now but we can't put two basketball games on the screen at the same time?]

So what can we do?  We’re stuck with this until 2014.  It gets worse every year instead of better as CBS looks for more ways to cash in at the expense of watchability (if that’s even a word).  Remember when they used to share a little with ESPN?  Maybe we can take Greg Gumbel hostage until they agree.  At the very least can we get the remote control away from the Chimp?