ESPN’s choice of interviews following CBS’s selection show on Sunday was quite interesting. While CBS had television feeds piped into teams celebrating because they had just been selected to play in the big dance, ESPN took the counter-view.
One by one they filed in for interviews. Head coaches for three of the eight teams appearing on ESPN’s list of biggest at-large snubs were interviewed. If you were watching, you saw Bob Huggins of Kansas St., Jim Boeheim of Syracuse, and Bruiser Flint of Drexel all state their case as to why they got robbed of a bid.
Considering the fact that CBS holds the television rights to the tournament, it’s not a huge surprise that ESPN initially took a counter-approach. I do have to give kudos to ESPN for their post-tournament selection coverage. I thought it was great TV; I’d much rather hear an interview with a pissed off coach of a team that feels it got jobbed than an interview with a coach excited that his program will be making a first round exit.
Once they got done with the snub interviews, they moved on with true tournament analysis — it was an excellent hour of tournament programming.
More Hot Stories at larrybrownsports.com
This entry was posted on Monday, March 12th, 2007 and is filed under College Basketball, Policing the Media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
Aside from the CBS-ESPN(ABC) issue,there is a lot to be learned here. Everyone is against the BCS system for college football and most of those people point to college hoops as an example of how things are settled on the court.
Note that they choose 65 teams for the basketball tournament, and there is still controversy over the omission of four or five others. How will this play out in football, where it has been suggested that they have a four or eight team playoff? Obviously the outcry from fans and coaches of teams that miss those playoffs will be even greater than the voices heard on ESPN.
I am not advocating keeping the present BCS system intact. The purpose of this post is just to point out that any selection system will make someone unhappy, and where college sports are concerned, their objections will be stated in a most vociferous manner (enter ESPN, with a chance to embarrass CBS).
“Boeheim” is ancient germano/austrian for
“douche nozzle”