Monday Morning Meltdown: March Madness

I was watching the hometown five take it in the shorts against top-seeded Kansas on Saturday afternoon when I had an epiphany. I turned to Mrs. Gopher, who was intermittently listening to my frequent rants, and said, "I don't think sports telecasts are produced with sports fans in mind."

The sequence that triggered my ire occurred midway through the second half, as UNLV's Joe Darger picked up his fourth and fifth fouls in about a 20-second span. Darger is basically a swingman being forced to defend the rim because the Rebels are so small this year, and his departure with 10 minutes to play was the final nail in their coffin.

So I was already ticked off, because it appeared that Darger's fourth foul was a total mirage -- an illegal screen on offense, his second of the game and a real judgment call -- and his fifth foul was an over-the-back on defense when four guys went up in a pack and the ref picked out Darger. But what really bunched my undies was the fact that CBS didn't replay either call.

Any UNLV fan knows that Darger is a huge presence (no pun intended) in their lineup, so I'm sure we all wanted some visual proof of the fouls he supposedly committed. But showing a replay of a moving screen and a scrum going for a rebound isn't good TV. The two plays were crucial to the Jayhawks' ability to run away from the Rebels the rest of the way, but we never got a second look at either of them.

If I were a conspiracy theorist (or at least a full-time conspiracy theorist) I might be tempted to say that CBS didn't want to show the replays because they would reveal the officials' incompetence, and the Big Eye is so in bed with the NCAA that it's avoiding criticism of the refs at any cost.

But I don't think it runs that deep. I don't think that much thought was put into the refusal to replay those calls. I think the producer or director just figured those plays were too wonkish, too inside-basketball for the average fan to care about them. Why replay two significant but visually forgettable plays when you can show a monster two-handed dunk for the umpteenth time? That's what the March Madness audience wants, because CBS knows the March Madness audience is composed of people who watch 90 percent of their basketball during this three-week stretch and care more about the integrity of their brackets than the integrity of the game.

Not that CBS gets it right when they do show replays. Thanks in part to the "innovations" that FOX brought to sports TV when they started covering the NFL, CBS has fallen into the trap of the ultra-closeup, making sure we can see the facial expressions and flying sweat of one or two players, rather than giving us the big picture.

For example, one of Kansas' key 3-pointers in the second half came off a kickout pass from their point guard to a sharpshooter on the wing. Said sharpshooter was wide open, and I was wondering what happened to UNLV's defense to leave him completely unguarded. Were they packing the lane to compensate for their lack of size? Did the shooter's man try to pinch the point guard and disrupt his dribble, or did he get into the wrong passing lane?

Well, the replay didn't give me any help. CBS used a camera angle that showed the back of the point guard and the face of the man guarding him -- and nothing else -- then followed the ball from the passer's hands to the shooter's hands. Then another super-extreme closeup of the shooter as he released the ball, and then the predictable shot of the ball spinning through the air, reaching the top of its arc and dropping through the hoop with a lovely swish (as if something might have happened during the flight of the shot to affect its accuracy).

It made for a wonderfully artistic piece of footage for CBS. The director's buddies probably slapped him on the back and said he was a shoe-in for the Pulitzer Prize For The Presentation Of Sports Beauty. But it didn't tell me a damn thing about why Kansas was able to score three points against UNLV on that trip down the court.

But again, sports telecasts aren't produced for me, or anybody else who cares about sports. They're produced with the big Final Four montage in mind -- you know, the One Shining Moment when CBS gets to show off their technological artistry. If you want journalism, read a newspaper.

They still publish newspapers, right?