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The stories behind Selection Sunday

The people, history and near pitfalls that made the Selection Show into a gem in sports programming

The NCAA Basketball Championship Selection Show is one of the longest-running reality shows on broadcast television.

It’s a day for winners and losers. You’re either in, or you’re out. Seasons are defined and bubbles are burst as the NCAA tournament brackets are made public from a CBS studio in New York.

“My favorite 30 minutes,” CBS lead announcer Jim Nantz first started saying in the 1980s as he unveiled the brackets during what was then a half-hour program.

This past Sunday, CBS aired its 35th edition of the Selection Show, expanded to two hours and chock-full of

The team of Greg Gumbel (left), Clark Kellogg, Seth Davis and Doug Gottlieb break down tournament selections during last year’s show.
Photo by: CBS Sports
opinions, analysis and highlights. But the guts of the show — the unveiling of the brackets — haven’t changed since the early 1980s.

“It’s the most natural reality TV you can have because you’re watching as teams learn their fate,” said Len DeLuca, the former CBS producer who is now a senior vice president in IMG’s original content division. “It’s conspiracy theories, it’s metrics, who’s on the bubble. It’s got it all.”

The Selection Show, which launches March Madness and The Road to the Final Four, as CBS has coined the tournament, generally draws bigger viewing audiences than the most popular regular-season game, partly because it appeals to both avid and casual fans.

“I am constantly amazed at how much interest people have, specifically people who don’t necessarily watch a lot of college basketball during the season will all of a sudden be completely captivated by the brackets,” said CBS Sports Chairman Sean McManus. “It’s a little like the NFL draft in that there is no athletic competition, but there is great interest in what a group of men sitting in a hotel room decide. We try to capture that drama going out to the live reactions of as many schools as we can. It’s a show that has a lot of enthusiasm, but also some heartbreak. There’s real human drama in the show.”

The show itself doesn’t sound like it should have so much drama. A representative of the NCAA’s 10-person men’s basketball committee emerges from a hotel conference room, hands the finished bracket to a CBS producer, who gets the graphics ready for the show.

That’s the extent of it. The NCAA does not even release any white smoke to show that the seedings have been finalized.

The stories of what happens behind the scenes when Sunday afternoon upsets lead to last-minute changes or when CBS gets the bracket with just minutes to go before the show starts are legendary.

Take last year, for instance, when the chaos at CBS’s broadcast studio was ratcheted to another level. On Sunday afternoon, the committee sent CBS a dozen brackets, each of which depended on the outcome of a few conference tournaments that still were being played, such as Michigan State playing Wisconsin in the Big Ten final and SMU facing Connecticut in the American Athletic.

The committee made contingencies for contingencies.

“I’ll never forget that day,” said Dan Gavitt, the NCAA vice president who oversees the men’s basketball tournament, and whose father was instrumental in the creation of the Selection Show in 1982, when CBS first owned the NCAA’s rights. “It was a wild Sunday.”

After 35 years, the Selection Show continues to deliver viewers and buzz, despite immovable deadlines and unpredictable storylines that qualify it as a uniquely perfect fit for live programming.

Here are some of the stories that have made the Selection Show such a March Madness institution.

■ ■ ■

It’s common knowledge that CBS won the NCAA’s rights in 1982 and that the proposal of a groundbreaking Selection Show was instrumental in the network’s bid.

But most people don’t recall the first selection show. The very first. And it wasn’t CBS’s show. It was ESPN’s Selection Sunday show in 1980 that triggered this new programming trend.

The show’s host that year, Bob Ley, like most people, doesn’t have many specific memories of that first show 36

ESPN held the first selection show in 1980 with Bob Ley as the host.
years ago on the fledgling all-sports cable channel.

Ley remembers the NCAA tournament committee faxing ESPN a sheet with the bracket. He remembers ESPN’s production team building the graphics. And he remembers going on-air around 3:30 p.m. to announce the seeds.

But he doesn’t recall production meetings leading up to the show. ESPN was only 6 months old at the time, and it badly needed unique programming. Creating a show around the NCAA tournament pairings didn’t seem like that much of a reach.

“It was no big deal,” Ley said. “It was not like the nuclear launch codes. It wasn’t the papal election. It was a fax coming in.”

Ley, who hosted the show in 1980 and 1981, does remember the amount of interest in the show, particularly from within the college basketball community.

“By the end of that first tournament, it was apparent that we had captured some lightning in a bottle,” Ley said. “We would hear stories of how people would be at conference tournaments — teams and coaches and media — and they would be in a hotel that didn’t have ESPN, and they’d rent a room across the street at the other hotel that had it.”

■ ■ ■
 
By the end of NBC’s contract with the NCAA in 1981, CBS had become interested in the property, although there was no indication that CBS could unseat the incumbent.

But the NCAA’s highly intelligent executive director, Walter Byers, was known for his prickly personality. When talks with NBC Sports chief Arthur Watson went sideways, CBS saw an opening, according to Kevin O’Malley, who was part of a team that included Van Gordon Sauter and Carl Lindemann that went to the NCAA’s headquarters at the time in Kansas City to make a $48 million offer. Sauter, who later ran CBS News, infamously opened by saying to Byers, “I don’t know much about sports, but my guys tell me we ought to do this.” It was Sauter’s way of disarming Byers.

Brent Musburger and Billy Packer work the 1985 show.
“Van said we weren’t going to walk in with our pinstripe suits,” O’Malley said. “We just went in there and had a conversation.”

Central to the pitch — O’Malley did most of the talking and largely was the architect — was a live Selection Show to reveal the 48-team bracket, which has since expanded over the years to the current 68 teams.

They met with Byers and Tom Jernstedt from the NCAA, and Wayne Duke and Dave Gavitt from the basketball committee. To move forward with a deal, CBS needed an unusual commitment on Selection Sunday.

In the days before a selection show, committee members would simply phone the coaches and athletic directors to let them know what regional they would play in. That would no longer work, CBS told them.

“There couldn’t be any leaks,” said O’Malley, who became the show’s executive producer. “No exceptions. We all wondered if we could keep the brackets a secret.

“Ultimately, though, we knew we were the only ones who could do this. We had started ‘NFL Today’ a few years before. We knew how to do the studio show.”

When the deal came together in 1981 — the first Selection Show debuted in 1982 — the 24-hour news cycle was just becoming a trend.

“Think about what was happening in the early 1980s,” DeLuca said. “You have ESPN having been born two years earlier. You have CNN being born a year earlier. Now you’re starting to have the 24-hour news cycle. It’s in its infancy, but it’s being created. With that came a thirst. So instead of reading about it the next day in the newspaper, or the evening news that night, it was going to be treated as instant news. That was the theory of CBS.

“There were people at the NCAA who thought this was a bad thing. They worried that the print journalists would be offended. This meant the news was coming off the TV, not being handed to the writers like it had been.”

■ ■ ■

While CBS demanded bracket confidentiality so that it was the only place to see the brackets, ESPN saw the brackets as a chance to scoop the rights holder, or at least play even with its own unofficial selection show.

Some of the fiercest NCAA tournament battles in the 1990s occurred between the CBS and ESPN communications departments, with PR vets LeslieAnne Wade and Mike Soltys delivering missives at each other, usually via Rudy Martzke’s USA Today column.

The biggest bone of contention was ESPN’s own bracket show, which announced the pairing only seconds after

Schools hold rallies to watch the Selection Show, and live feeds provide the reactions of players and fans as the bracket unfolds and pairings are announced for the upcoming tournament.
CBS did.

“In many years it went on, we would have somebody at the press conference faxing in or calling in the pairings,” Soltys said. “Many times, and we didn’t say this publicly, we were watching CBS and quickly typing the graphics and then going with it. We tried to project that we had hidden moles that were getting us the brackets.”

Soltys remembers Martzke reporting that somebody from the NCAA tournament committee would fax the brackets over to ESPN. As Soltys recalls, that led Jim Nantz in the late 1990s to read a Selection Show promo during the Big East championship game, saying “We get the exclusive rights. We don’t rely on some cheap fax machine.”

“I was watching at home laughing,” Soltys said. “And Rudy Martzke was watching at home laughing. Probably the rest of the audience had no idea about the reference.”

It was 2001 when CBS expanded the Selection Show to an hour, which was no easy feat. The expansion of the show required CBS to bump the network news and push “60 Minutes” back another 30 minutes. That rarely happened.

“Think about that: Only ‘mother’ NFL is allowed to do that,” DeLuca said. “That’s the strength of the Selection Show.”

At the time, the NCAA also negotiated a deal with ESPN. If ESPN agreed to wait until 7 p.m. to air its selection show, the NCAA would work with the network to create a studio desk inside the Final Four venue.

Fine, ESPN said.

“We just put the brackets on ‘SportsCenter’ at 6,” said DeLuca, who left CBS to join ESPN in 1996 and stayed 14 years. “The NCAA tried to protect CBS, but the news is the news.”

■ ■ ■

McManus saw the promise of the Selection Show when he started his CBS Sports career in 1996. But it wasn’t until CBS analyst Billy Packer blasted the NCAA tournament committee chair in 2004 that McManus saw how much power the Sunday evening show had on national conversations.

The focus of Packer’s ire that year was St. Joseph’s — a mid-major school from Philadelphia that was having a miracle season and entered the tournament as a No. 1 seed at 27-1. Packer barked at Bob Bowlsby, the committee chair, for giving the Hawks a No. 1 seed because they played a lighter schedule in the Atlantic 10 Conference.

St. Joe’s coach, Phil Martelli, fired back at Packer during several interviews over the course of the tournament, and a war of words ensued.

“It really became a touchstone of the tournament,” McManus said. “That was one of the instances where something that we said — controversial or not — could become part of the national conversation. It really became a theme throughout the entire tournament. When that happened, it crystallized for me how important this show was on the American sports scene.

“I am constantly amazed at how much interest people have, specifically people who don’t necessarily watch a lot of college basketball during the season. They will all of a sudden be completely captivated by the brackets.”

■ ■ ■

The Selection Show in recent years has focused more on opinion and analysis than previously, when the network spent more time interviewing coaches.

“In the last six or seven years, we tried to cut down more on the coach interviews,”

McManus said of the show, which is now a joint CBS/Turner Sports production. “As much as I respect all the coaches, we didn’t get a lot of new material from them. People find that listening to our analysis is probably more valuable than talking to coaches.”

Sunday’s Selection Show took a leap forward by expanding from one hour to two hours. But CBS, Turner and the NCAA aren’t finished, they say.

Look for more innovations to come.

The NCAA and CBS/Turner have discussed taking the Selection Show on the road, possibly in front of a live audience like ESPN’s “College GameDay” or the NFL draft.

That’s an interesting concept and something that’s been bandied about before.

The NCAA has thought about unveiling the brackets in front of a crowd going back to the birth of the Hall of Champions, which was built in the Indianapolis headquarters in 2000. Officials discussed the possibility of staging the Selection Show there with a live audience, but the idea never took flight.

It appears that the NCAA and its broadcast partners might be interested in reviving the idea of doing the show remotely, adding to the evolution of the program.

“The show started out years ago as a half-hour show, then an hour and now two hours,” McManus said. “It’s become almost an American institution that people look forward to — the revealing of the seeds for the NCAA basketball championship.”

History of the NCAA Tournament Selection Show on CBS

On-air talent a who's who of sports broadcasting with the likes of Brent Musburger, Jim Nantz, James Brown, Greg Gumbel and others

Date HH rating Avg. # of viewers (millions) Analysts
03/07/1982 7.3 8.626 Brent Musburger, Gary Bender
03/13/1983 7.3 9.598 Brent Musburger, Gary Bender, Billy Packer
03/11/1984 7.4 10.353 Brent Musburger, Gary Bender, Billy Packer
03/10/1985 7.8 11.119 Brent Musburger, James Brown, Billy Packer, Doug Collins
03/09/1986 7.1 8.529 Brent Musburger, Jim Nantz, Billy Packer, James Brown
03/08/1987 6.5 8.629 Jim Nantz, Brent Musburger, Billy Packer, Tim Brant
03/13/1988 6.5 8.354 Billy Packer, James Brown, Jim Nantz
03/12/1989 6.1 7.823 Jim Nantz, James Brown, Billy Packer, Tim Brant
03/11/1990 8.7 12.172 Jim Nantz, Billy Packer, James Brown
03/10/1991 7.6 10.916 Jim Nantz, Billy Packer, Mike Francesa
03/15/1992 8.0 10.990 Jim Nantz, Billy Packer, Mike Francesa
03/14/1993 8.8 11.992 Jim Nantz, Billy Packer, Mike Francesa
03/13/1994 7.5 10.229 Jim Nantz, Billy Packer, Mike Francesa
03/12/1995 5.2 7.148 Jim Nantz, Billy Packer, Quinn Buckner, George Raveling
03/10/1996 6.2 8.015 Pat O'Brien, Quinn Buckner, George Raveling
03/09/1997 5.8 7.803 Pat O'Brien, Quinn Buckner, George Raveling
03/08/1998 6.5 9.169 Greg Gumbel, Clark Kellogg, Dean Smith
03/07/1999 5.9 8.417 Greg Gumbel, Clark Kellogg
03/12/2000 5.9 8.631 Greg Gumbel, Clark Kellogg
03/11/2001 5.6 8.189 Greg Gumbel, Clark Kellogg, Bonnie Bernstein
03/10/2002 5.4 7.535 Greg Gumbel, Clark Kellogg
03/16/2003 4.6 6.581 Greg Gumbel, Clark Kellogg, Bill Raftery
03/14/2004 5.0 7.515 Greg Gumbel, Clark Kellogg, Seth Davis
03/13/2005 4.9 7.687 Greg Gumbel, Clark Kellogg, Seth Davis
03/12/2006 4.6 6.839 Greg Gumbel, Clark Kellogg, Seth Davis
03/11/2007 4.3 6.569 Greg Gumbel, Clark Kellogg, Seth Davis
03/16/2008 4.0 6.176 Greg Gumbel, Clark Kellogg, Seth Davis
03/15/2009 4.3 7.079 Greg Gumbel, Greg Anthony, Seth Davis
03/14/2010 4.1 6.664 Greg Gumbel, Greg Anthony, Seth Davis
03/13/2011 4.0 6.476 Greg Gumbel, Greg Anthony, Charles Barkley, Kenny Smith, Seth Davis
03/11/2012 3.6 5.903 Greg Gumbel, Greg Anthony, Seth Davis
03/17/2013 4.2 6.504 Greg Gumbel, Greg Anthony, Seth Davis, Doug Gottlieb
03/16/2014 4.1 6.800 Greg Gumbel, Clark Kellogg, Seth Davis, Doug Gottlieb
03/15/2015 3.5 5.486 Greg Gumbel, Clark Kellogg, Seth Davis, Doug Gottlieb

Note: Live plus same-day effective beginning in 2006.  Sources: Nielsen National Ratings, CBS Sports


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