Joel Bulkley
College basketball’s prime season is here.
The NCAA men’s games again will be on four networks–CBS, TNT, TBS, TruTV, with pretty much the same broadcast crew as last year. The A team is Ian Eagle, Bill Raftery, Grant Hill, Tracy Wolfson. They’ll do the Final Four and championship.
Eagle replaced Jim Nantz last year. Ernie Johnson will be the chief host in New York in the first year since host Greg Gumbel of CBS died. Final Four is April 5, championship April 7. The rest of the lineup (28 broadcasters including 7 women) looks mostly like last year’s and includes former ACC players/announcers Dan Bonner (Va), Brendan Haywood (UNC), Jim Sparnarkel (Duke).
Women’s NCAA games will be on ABC, ESPN, ESPN2, ESPN News, ESPNU. Final Four is April 4 (Friday), championship April 6. Have no idea about the broadcasters because ESPN hasn’t put out anything yet.
Fox Sports left Jay Williams (ESPN) off their list of Duke’s top ten basketball players of all time. The list had Hill, Laettner, Redick, Tatum, Williamson, Brand, Boozer, Battier, Deng, Hurley.
Awful Announcing ranked the top college hoops broadcast teams. I. Eagle/B. Raftery (CBS) was first, D. Shulman/ J. Bilas (ESPN) second, G. Johnson/B. Raftery (Fox) third, N. Eagle/R. Hummel (NBC) fourth. Also D. Pasch/F. Frascilla (ESPN) fifth, B. Anderson/G. Hill ((TNT) sixth, J. Benetti/ S. Kustok (Fox/FS1) seventh, G. Johnson/J. Jackson (Fox) eighth, S. Dedes/J. Spanarkel (CBS/CBSSN) ninth, G. Catalan/ Steve Lappas (CBS/CBSSN) tenth. Not a surprise, Cory Alexander of ACCN wasn’t on the list. But many who are will work the NCAA men’s games.
UNC/Duke game 2 hoops averaged 3.0M viewers, the second most for an ESPN game this season, slightly lower than last year’s second meeting (3.1M). First on the TV list this season was the Illinois/Arkansas Turkey Day game (5M) that followed a CBS NFL game. The earlier UNC/Duke game had 2.3M viewers and was fourth. For ESPN, the Ala/Auburn game March 8 before the Carolina/Duke contest drew 2.1M viewers. Duke and Alabama account for seven of the top ten games, per SportsMediaWatch.
Dan Shulman and Jay Bilas of ESPN did not do any ACC Tournament games, working multiple games at the SEC event in Nashville.
We lost two big-time talents, newspaper writer/author John Feinstein and actor/director Gene Hackman. No, “Hoosiers” isn’t the best sports movie ever but Hackman was the best coach. Feinstein was a fan of college basketball and the ACC of the highest order.
Changes coming: MLB and ESPN agreed to opt out of TV broadcast agreement after 2025. A steaming network likely will jump in. Dan Wetzel of Yahoo Sports joined ESPN’s new investigative division, headed by Juanita Ceballas. Steven A Smith got the bag, a five-year $100M contract. Why so much? Because the former Philadelphia sportswriter is now an entertainer and has thoughts about entering politics. Sound familiar?
Former HBO boxing analyst Jim Lampley, who will call a boxing PPV tripleheader May 2 in Times Square, has a memoir, “It Happened! A Uniquely Lucky Life in Sports.”
Good stuff: Garden & Gun magazine story on “Inside the fight to save the world’s most endangered wolf” about the declining number of red wolves (17). The N&O did a survey about what readers want or don’t want. Maybe some improvements will be made.
Not So Good. Associated Press report on Duke basketball game in Miami (espn.com) failed to mention Duke’s Proctor left the game (injury) in the first half and did not return. There was an old saying, “UPI has it first but AP has it right.” The new saying might be will AP have it at all.
Favorite quote of the week: “It’s not okay for North Carolina basketball to just be okay.”—Scott Van Pelt, ESPN SportsCenter anchor.
