Notre Dame forward Carleton Scott reacts to losing to Old Dominion. Many regions of the country didn't get to see the dramatic ending as it happened. (AP)
It was a spectacular opening day of games for CBS and the NCAA Tournament. In fact, it’s the best one I’ve ever seen and is now being regarded as the most exhilarating first day in Tourney history.
I spoke with two of the men who are responsible with projecting the games all across the country, the men who make the decisions on what games you see when: CBS Sports president Sean McManus and Executive Vice President of Programming, Mike Aresco.
There weren’t too many close calls in terms of back-and-forth decisions, but early on the Notre Dame-Old Dominion/Florida-BYU/Robert Morris-Villanova game provided some frantic finishes and a need for a nimble trigger finger.
Some sections of the country were not given the chance to see the final seconds of the ODU-ND game, though McManus and Aresco could not and would not definitively say that was the case. Why? Well, the previous hours of their lives before I spoke with them involved many wild finishes (this was after Murray State’s win) and their brains were buzzing with so many Tournament-related things that they couldn’t remember if they specifically took the game out of the West region or not.
“Every game is divided up into two regions,” Aresco said. “For instance, the BYU-Florida game was a ‘constant’ in Florida and Utah, meaning it’s not going to get moved unless there are extreme circumstances — a buzzer-beater in another game with less than 10 seconds remaining. We also have the ‘flex’ region, which is the rest of the part of the country that that game is getting.”
While all this was going on, neither man would claim to definitively stating it purposely neglected a certain region of the country because the BYU-Florida game was the constant, but that’s believed to be the case.
“It might’ve been on a constant, and if they were on a constant we probably didn’t take them out, but I don’t know the specific of that,” McManus said. “I know the vast majority of the country saw all the buzzer beaters today, and if there’s a market that was missed it was probably because of the constant.”
Aresco further echoed that response.
“I don’t recall,” Aresco said. “I’d have to see, but it’s possible on the West Coast, they probably had Florida-BYU and they may not have been able to get the end because it was coming down to the wire on Florida-BYU and we decided to just show them the taped ending of Notre Dame-Old Dominion because you just don’t want to take people out when it’s also incredibly closer to where they live. But my mind’s flying right now because I can’t remember all the scenarios.”
Fortunately, many of the close games today didn’t get really bumper to bumper, though these guys are in the control room and always following each game’s spurts and trends, just in case. And finding each rhythm is another science in itself.
“You’ve gotta be aware when teams are likely to call timeouts,” Aresco said. “With the flexes, you’re always careful.”
It’s not an easy job to keep the entire country happy, and McManus and Aresco take it very seriously. They’re not worried about getting too many people frustrated because it’s so hard to give every single pocket of the country what it needs at every moment, unless all other games aren’t being played when one game is having a game-deciding shot go down.
“You have to get a really good feel for when to switch, and even though you get burnt some times—because you can’t control what happens—it’s a pretty good system and I think we make the right decision most of the time,” McManus said.
Since McManus got the job of President of CBS Sports he’s spent nearly every hour in the control room at the CBS building in Manhattan. It’s where he not only feels obligated to be, but where he’s comfortable.
“I’ve never not been in the control room or in the truck for a Final Four game,” he said.
Aresco is the one who draws the regional maps and determines what part of the country sees which games. Saturday’s times have already been decided, and Sunday’s will probably be determined by 8 p.m. Friday.
“I’m working with Sean and Harold Bryant to switch games back and forth, which is the biggest part of what we’re doing today. … In addition, I am keeping track of start times for later games, trying to figure out where we might have an issue with a market we might have to pull out if another game is crashing into it. And a little later I’ll start doing the matchups on Saturday and Sunday.”
I’ll have additional stuff from McManus on Duke, the CBS contract and pacing himself through this three-weekend marathon on Saturday night.
