It’s only the second week of the college basketball season, and already ESPN has brought us the Preseason NIT, the Maui Invitational, the Great Alaska Shootout, the Tipoff Classic and now, Tuesday and Wednesday nights, the inaugural Great Eight.
Whatever happened to State U. filling up on all those Creampuff City Colleges the first month of the schedule?
“Players like to play against the best,” says CBS analyst Billy Packer, whose own network managed to match up North Carolina and Texas Saturday and then defending champion Arkansas and Georgetown Sunday. “When I think back on where college basketball was 20 years ago, you had very few intersectional matchups.
“Teams basically played in their own locale. Only one team from a given league went into the NCAA tournament. Now coaches don’t mind putting it on the line because they realize their strength of schedule and their ability to develop their team over the course of three or four months is of much more importance than padding the schedule with patsies.”
Thus, we’ve had losses by such highly ranked teams as Arizona, Indiana, Maryland and Syracuse. And it’s still November. All of which Packer sees as a plus for the sport-and for television.
“It gives the fan great games to watch; it gives the players great opportunity to put their game and their experience on the line,” he says. “It’s terrific.”
Adds Quinn Buckner, who returned to CBS this year after a brief fling at coaching in the NBA: “I agree for many of the same reasons. As a player, I want to play the best competition and, frankly, I don’t care when we play it. As a coach, you get a chance to put your team in a scenario similar to the NCAA tournament schedule. A coach like (Duke’s) Mike Krzyzewski will do that during the course of the season.”
The Great Eight replaces another made-for-ESPN event, the Big East-Atlantic Coast Conference Challenge. Some of those coaches, most notably Georgetown’s John Thompson, didn’t like the format, especially when they had to go up against a Duke or a North Carolina when there was always another St. Leo or Florida Tech to beat up on.
“We’re a big-event nation and people anticipate big events,” says Lesley Visser, who will be covering the Great Eight for ESPN. “Kids are used to playing in them.”
“In football, you lose one game early and the season is over in terms of a national championship,” says Dick Vitale, ESPN’s resident college basketball expert. “Also, coaches are more secure now in terms of finances. They’re not afraid to take a loss early in the year. So you don’t see a lot of the Cupcake Classics we’ve seen in the past, where teams just loaded up with all kinds of automatic wins. From a coach’s standpoint, you get a truer evaluation of your team rather than in one of those 120-50 blowouts. This way, you play someone tough and you find out who can flat-out play.”
Other stuff: WCBR-FM is carrying Loyola men’s basketball games for the sixth straight season, with play-by-play man Mark Pinski and analyst Chuck Schwarz, who doubles as the Ramblers’ athletic director. . . . Five Midwestern Collegiate Conference women’s basketball games will air live on SportsChannel in addition to the weekly MCC men’s basketball series. . . . The Great Midwest Conference has 60 men’s basketball appearances slated for national TV this season, including 12 featuring De Paul, two of which will be on SportsChannel’s GMC Sunday night Game of the Week package. . . . No sooner did RCA begin marketing its Digital Satellite System, with its 18-inch receiving dish, than the NFL reached an agreement with DIRECTV Inc. to distribute the league’s pay-per-view “Sunday Ticket” on the 150-channel DBS service. . . . ESPN received 24 CableACE Award nominations last week, including four each for “SportsCenter” and “Outside the Lines.” The latter also was honored last week with the 1994 Sports Journalism Award for Broadcast Media from Northeastern University’s Center for the Study of Sports in Society and the School of Journalism. . . . Leave it to NFL Films and Turner Home Entertainment to come up with a CD-ROM filled with “NFL’s Greatest Plays.” Available in both MPC and Macintosh platforms, the program allows viewers to see the footage from up to three angles in addition to stats and bios on some of the players.
Random thoughts: Kudos to producer Bob Goodrich for plugging into Prime Ticket’s video coverage of the Notre Dame-USC game Saturday night when ABC temporarily lost its power at the Los Angeles Coliseum due to high winds. Although it might have been more fun to listen to former IHSA basketball voice Tom Kelly on the Prime play-by-play than putting Keith Jackson and Bob Griese on a cheap-sounding phone line. . . . Worst move was Fox Sports missing the Cardinals recovering a kickoff late in the Bears game Sunday. “It’s our understanding the officials didn’t hold up play for a sufficient amount of time,” said a Fox spokesman. A technical snafu also added to the Fox confusion when an NBC feed momentarily appeared on WFLD-Ch. 32. No game officials were blamed for that glitch. . . . With broadcasting partner NBC needing a strong opener for its Jan. 2 college bowl double-header (and Texas Tech-who?-already the host team), don’t be shocked when Notre Dame accepts its Cotton bid. . . . And doesn’t CBS’ new studio host Michele Tafoya look and act remarkably like NBC’s Hannah Storm?
Programming note: Bears fullback Bob Christian talks about his religious beliefs with Julie Judelson on “The SportsChannel Report” at 9:30 p.m. Wednesday. “The first time that I was really persecuted for my beliefs was in high school because I wasn’t having sex,” says Christian.