King Kaufman's Sports Daily

Stodgy old CBS does its usual sterling job with the NCAA Tournament. Plus: End-game awfulness.

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March 26, 2008 | Every year during the NCAA Tournament I'm struck again by what a good job CBS does with it. It's really remarkable how, year after year, the Eye resists the temptation to jazz up its coverage with new elements that are innovative, clever and dynamic. And that suck.

Once again this year we've been spared camera angles that bring us closer to the action -- while also making that action impossible to see.

So as players roar downcourt on fast break after fast break, are we treated to that baseline camera, through which we can see a bunch of bodies getting rapidly bigger but not the ball or what becomes of it? We are not.

Are we switched to the unique perspective of the camera mounted on top of the backboard, which affords us a dazzling view that's impossible to get in real life -- and that no one has ever been interested in getting? Because you can't see what happens to the ball? Which is why they don't sell seats on top of the backboard? And don't try to say they can't sell seats up there because if they thought somebody'd pay a few thousand a pop, they'd figure out a way? We are not.

Time and again we are forced to watch fast breaks unfolding through the center-court camera. It's staid. It's boring. It's tired. It's retrograde. It's the best basketball coverage on television.

We also have been denied having our view of the game provided from the worst seat in the house, with the players looking like little scurrying ants. This is an angle that brings us closer to the fans in the arena. The very fans we'd chosen not to be among when we decided to watch the game on TV instead of paying $150 for nosebleed seats.

CBS just has no consideration sometimes.

At least on the Bay Area affiliate I was watching, CBS went 50 minutes without a commercial Saturday as it followed the first half of the Stanford-Marquette game and the end of the Xavier-Purdue game. That's an astonishing stretch on network television. It's five minutes longer than the 45 minutes American TV networks supposedly couldn't go without ads to cover a soccer match properly.

I'm sure CBS got its ads in, but I don't know that any other network would have been as conscientious. Surely it could have cut away during one of the Stanford-Marquette media timeouts before Xavier-Purdue was at the very end, with Greg Gumbel assuring us, "We'll get you back in time for the last few seconds."

And for all the heat they take in blogland, the announcers have been fine too. Billy Packer hasn't gone off on any rants that I've heard, and Gus Johnson has. Perfect. I miss Bill Walton, but you can't have everything.

Stodgy old CBS. Best sports network in TV land.

Next page: Hobby horse watch: The slow, boring ends of college games. Plus: My favorite team, deserving losers