Last year, as CBS was in the middle of their overly bloated 2-hour NCAA Tournament selection show, there was a miracle.
Someone leaked the full bracket online.
This fully undercut what was already a disaster of a program, and though it likely wasn’t fully to blame for the show’s very poor ratings, it certainly didn’t help. CBS has responded by cutting back from two hours to ninety minutes this year, which is sort of like a surgeon deciding to reattach one disembodied leg, holding up the other leg, then tossing it aside and calling it a day.
The latest
Leaks aren’t new, of course. If you follow a team’s beat writers and bloggers on Twitter, you’ll generally get tipped off as to their opponent and location before the show reveals that information. That’s been the case for the past few years now. It’s not always true, of course, but it does happen. But the entire bracket leaking is something else entirely.
CBS likely wouldn’t acknowledge it on the air, and would indeed continue to proceed as though things were normal. And no one would watch. (Well, fewer people would watch.) Their best course of action, upon learning that the full and authentic bracket had leaked, might be to abandon the filler analysis and just roll through the seedings themselves.
That would at least ensure a semblance of relevance for the program, since the leaked bracket’s authenticity could only be confirmed by the show’s reveal. Then the remainder of the time could be spent with the analysis portion of the program. Of course, that’s still ninety minutes of mostly filler, but then CBS made that bed for themselves.
CBS had a really good thing with the selection show. At an hour, there wasn’t time for filler, for endless manufactured drama. Generally a full quarter of the bracket was revealed before the first commercial break. That’s an acceptable and even enjoyable pace, and if there was a bit of intrigue at the end of the program, all the better. Then, after the hour was over, you could either pivot and start filling out your own brackets, or find analysis to watch. Or, you know, do other things with your day.
But at two hours, or even ninety minutes, the formula falls apart. CBS had lived in the sweet spot for a long time, managing to have people looking forward to a program that could have been more efficiently handled by a press release from the NCAA. And then they got greedy, which makes sense given what they’re paying the NCAA to broadcast the tournament to begin with. So maybe it was the NCAA’s greed. Hard to keep track.
Regardless, it would be fascinating to see the fallout if the bracket were to leak two straight seasons. Heads might roll for that one.
Hopefully it happens. Ninety minutes is still too long for this.
