After Selection Sunday, TNT’s Jim Jackson (left), Allie LaForce and Brian Anderson headed to Charlotte to call the action.tnt
It was just after 2:20 p.m. amid Texas’ off-day practice when TNT Sports play-by-play man Brian Anderson eagerly motioned down a mostly quiet press row.
“Allie,” Anderson exclaimed toward sideline reporter Allie LaForce, “[Texas forward Kadin] Shedrick has stim tape on his back,” pointing out the tape used for muscle treatment.
“I see it,” LaForce said, peering over her laptop inside a fanless Spectrum Center in Charlotte, starting to make a note in one of the eight team tabs on her MacBook.
Just down the row, color analyst Jim Jackson sat back in a metal folding chair. A tan, checkered bucket hat hung slightly over his brow as he took in the Longhorns’ workout ahead of a March 23 matchup with No. 2 seed Tennessee.
“It’s an easy crew,” Jackson said of his March Madness co-workers. “We have a great time. We keep it simple.”
The day between the first and second rounds of the NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament is an earned respite for the TNT Sports crew, complete with cardboard coffee cups, sweatpants, hoodies and quarter zips and nearly eight hours of sitting courtside for closed practices. Coaches and players cycle through the sideline media seats by the hour to catch up with the trio and update them with insights that would later be disseminated through their second-round broadcasts.
This is the easy part.
Getting There
The NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament Selection Show wrapped around 7 p.m. on Sunday, March 17. The internal email from CBS Sports and TNT Sports that revealed assignments for the first and second round was sent shortly thereafter.
Then came the mad dash.
Anderson, Jackson and LaForce — who are spread between home bases in Milwaukee, Los Angeles and Ohio, respectively — had roughly 72 hours to travel to Charlotte, become experts on the eight teams at their site and prepare for a Thursday that equates to around 10 hours on-air.
And, as if the window wasn’t tight enough, this year’s task included the first game of the tournament between Mississippi State and Michigan State at 12:15 p.m. ET on March 21.
Joked Anderson: “You’ve never crammed so much in your life.”
The morning after the Selection Show concluded, Anderson stepped into his home office for a daylong study session in Milwaukee. Packing a bag on short notice is one thing. Memorizing compelling discussion points about eight teams, 112 players and myriad coaches is a far more taxing challenge.
“At that point, it’s literally like, ‘Everybody, don’t talk to me,’” Anderson said, chuckling. “... I sat in my office at home with multiple screens watching video. I literally sat down at nine o’clock. I didn’t come out of there till 10 p.m., 10:30 p.m.”
Anderson still prefers a notebook to jot down highlights and stats that could be woven into the broadcast.ben portnoy
Anderson whips out the notebook in which he’s scrawled the 68-team field, offering evidence of a running game between the play-by-play announcer, his fellow broadcasters and a few members of the crew.
Yellow highlighter, black and red pen marks and a few other scattered notes cover two pages that more closely resemble a combination of Sudoku-meets-word-searches crossed with Immaculate Grid than an NCAA Tournament bracket.
Each March, the group guesses scenarios to whittle down which regional they may be sent to along with which teams might be included. Anderson scratches the bracket down as the NCAA Tournament Selection Show goes on to keep tabs. They estimate they’re right about half of the time.
“It’s like a big game of roulette,” said Anderson, a one-time baseball player at St. Mary’s University in San Antonio and a prominent voice in the NBA 2K video game franchise.
Anderson spends the bulk of his professional life engrossed in the NBA and Milwaukee Brewers baseball. LaForce’s past life includes time as a sideline reporter for “SEC on CBS” before shifting to NBA and March Madness coverage for TNT Sports. Jackson, meanwhile, is the one of the three who spends much of the calendar on the college side, working as an analyst for Fox Sports, along with calling Los Angeles Clippers games.
“Thank God we’ve seen Michigan State, UNC, Texas and Tennessee,” LaForce quipped, pointing to the crew’s familiarity with the squads from past years.
That’s certainly not a catch-all. Learning less widely broadcast programs such as Saint Peter’s and Wagner, among others, took ample work. The interviews for this story, even, were delayed to account for the broadcast team’s cram sessions.
Each announcer has his or her own note-taking habits that almost mirror their respective generations. LaForce, 35 and the youngest of the group, used to handwrite her notes, but felt it was harder to find tidbits from years past that way. “Notebooks get lost,” she said. LaForce has since pivoted to the notes app on her MacBook and iPhone. She keeps a file for each of the eight teams in Charlotte, color coding her bullet points using black and red — red meaning it’s information she’d like to include somewhere.
Jackson, 53, uses a reMarkable writing tablet that allows for hand-writing, but also stores files digitally. Anderson, 52, is more old school, siding with a notebook that’s not quite as dense as a Dan Brown novel, but it’s not too far off.
“Some teams you’re not going to know,” Jackson explained. “What I try to do is try to [watch] a late game, like their conference tournament game, and then a game during the season, just so you can get a sense and feel how they’ve grown from midseason to where they’re at.”
Standing in the tunnel in the southeast corner of Spectrum Center on the Wednesday ahead of the first round, Anderson looked back and forth between the yellow pages of his black, leatherbound notebook. He quietly muttered names under his breath, glancing from the court to his notebook and to the court again, visualizing the broadcast during open practice and identifying uniform numbers as he went.
“Nothing feels like Day 1,” Anderson said later. “Because you don’t ever do games the way we do Day 1.”
Game Day
If Monday through Wednesday of NCAA Tournament week is a sprint, Thursday is a marathon.
The day included four games and roughly 10 hours on-air. Jackson jokes he has the easy job, popping into the broadcast as needed, picking his spots. Anderson, he says, has the stiffer task.
“[Play-by-play announcers] set the table,” Jackson said. “They set the tone. They navigate. They narrate. I’ve got it easy compared to play-by-play, no question. I’m trying to stay out of the way, man.”
Anderson sits up, mimicking the hands at 10-and-2 approach he generally takes on calls. Straight back. Eyes front. Hands on the various papers and broadcasting materials in front of him.
“The concentration for four games is intense, because you’ve been sitting like this for two hours at a time,” Anderson said, demonstrating his pose. “I’ve noticed, especially as I’ve gotten older, I’ve got to stretch. I just gun green tea. We all just kind of snack all day. We don’t even really sit down for meals.”
Texas coach Rodney Terry (left) met with the crew as his team practiced.ben portnoy
By the time the crew did sit down with a reporter on Friday, they’d all had a chance to exhale. Only four teams remained — UNC, Michigan State, Tennessee and Texas — and the crash courses of early in the week shifted to digging deeper into storylines surrounding the first-round winners.
The Longhorns ran through transition drills as Anderson and Jackson sat in the media seating opposite the benches, chatting with a Texas men’s basketball staffer. LaForce, meanwhile, scrolled through headlines from the Austin American-Statesman and Detroit News to keep up with any new information.
The rest of the afternoon included a revolving door of coaches and players filling in blanks and adding color to potential storylines. Texas’ Max Abmas slid over to the sideline, sat on the table and chatted with LaForce. A Longhorns assistant coach popped over to talk with Jackson. Eventually, UT head coach Rodney Terry joined all three broadcasters for seven minutes of discussion.
“It’s surviving and advancing for us,” Anderson said. “We can only go two or three layers deep [the first day], whereas now we can go 10 layers deep.”
Well Traveled
The quiet moments offer brief chances for reflection amid another March Madness that’s off and running.
Broadcasting has its quirks. Anderson said he’ll call somewhere around 125 games per year between his varying roles. Jackson is nearing 30 college basketball games just this winter. LaForce is around 50 games annually.
There’s a nomadic nature to this lifestyle. Hotels. Planes. All of it creates added logistics to studying and calling games, and living life somewhere in between it all.
LaForce pulled up her Amazon account to show the countless addresses she’s had items shipped to in recent years — a product of her own profession along with help from her husband, Joe Smith, a former big-league pitcher who spent parts of 16 years in MLB with nine teams. It took five swooping swipes to hit the bottom of the list.
“How many addresses is that, like 17?” she’s asked.
“Wayyyyy more,” LaForce said, grinning.
She then pulled up a video sent to her the day before of her 1-year-old, Jacob, bouncing around the living room in a diaper. “You’ll love this,” LaForce said. The flatscreen affixed to the wall was tuned to her interview with North Carolina center Armando Bacot. Jacob pointed to the television, recognizing his mom on the screen. He then turned toward the camera with a look of bewilderment when LaForce disappeared from view.
“He’s like, ‘Where the hell is mom?’” LaForce said through an endearing smile.
Mom, then, was in Charlotte. This past week she headed to Los Angeles for the Sweet 16 and Elite Eight. Such is the annual tradition during the third month of the year.
March Madness rolls on.
