March Madness Media Memos

On occasion, I feel I must take it upon myself to refresh the ethics and common sense of my brothers and sisters in the mainstream media. And by "mainstream," I mean those pretty people who bring us sports on television, or anyone who has to leave the comfort of their coffee table to actually do some reporting. So you can stop reading now, Bill Simmons.

With that, here is the latest batch of media memos, this time with the delightful scent of March Madness...

TO: CBS ANNOUNCERS

RE: ONE-NIGHT STANDS

I'm so tired of college basketball announcers and their starf-king. Every time there's a star player on the court, the announcers sound like a bunch of girls in tube tops at a John Mayer concert. Last night, one of them compared LaMarcus Aldridge to Bill Walton, going as far to say he looked like Walton. Uh, have they ever looked at LaMarcus Aldridge? Do they even know what uniform number Aldridge is?

Who is Bradley center Patrick O'Bryant, and why should I have cared about him? I'm a casual college basketball fan, but I'm pretty sure I wasn't the only one who laid eyes on this kid for the first time in the tournament. Yet the announcers treated him like he was in the middle of the Player of the Year race with Adam Morrison and J.J. Redick.

Speaking of those two Great White Hypes, they both couldn't lead their teams out of the Sweet 16 in what should be their final college seasons. And maybe that's why the announcers feel the need to perform verbal fellatio on every star on the screen: because their time in college sports is so fleeting, they have to cram four years' worth of praise into a single tournament.

And another thing: what's with the overkill on Cinderella love? I know we all are infatuated with underdogs, from Rocky Balboa to Bill Clinton to the New England Patriots ... at least the first time. But here's my problem with NCAA tournament underdogs: they get all the glory if they win, and none of the criticism if they lose. Texas A&M, Northwestern State, Bradley, Bucknell, and Montana all won games "they weren't supposed to win," and the higher seeds they upset were slaughtered for "not showing up." But when all of those Cinderellas left the ball in the following rounds, it was in games that, again, "they weren't supposed to win." When, exactly, are we to start expecting teams like this to win? When do we start to kill them for not winning, like we do the higher seeds that crap out before the Elite Eight?

Why do we treat a tournament Cinderella like a 13-year-old Special Olympics athlete?

**

TO: LOCAL TV NEWS AFFILIATES

RE: COVERAGE OF DRUNKEN FANS IN COLLEGE BARS

Whenever a Washington, DC area sports team does well in the postseason, the local news has one reaction: overkill.

That means a good chunk of the sportscast at 11:25 PM will be given to said team. That means every on-air personality will take off their fancy clothes from Lord & Taylor and throw on cheerleader uniforms. And that means some poor reporter will be shuttled off to a bar and charged with finding obnoxious morons who can comment on their favorite team's fortunes.

It happened again this week with the George Mason University Patriots, whose run to the Sweet 16 was highlighted with an upset win over reigning NCAA men's basketball champion North Carolina. Soon, the Patriots were on the cover of SI and the New York Times was doing a feature on the closest sports bar to campus.

What the Times didn't do is fill 700 words with the kind of piffle the local TV news does. What's the point of these remotes, where a reporter is screaming over a bunch of beer-swigging knuckleheads who are more concerned with whom they'll be waking up next to than what team wins the game? Is it breaking news that sports fans like to gather in groups and yell at the TV? Boy, shine up that Pulitzer.

Until this GMU lovefest, I thought the DC media hit its all-time low with Redskins coverage last postseason. Washington made the playoffs for the first time in years, and then faced Tampa Bay in the first round. Every night produced another pathetic attempt at milking the Redskin cow for another puff piece. One DC station actually had a paid, professional reporter go house-to-house on "Buccaneer Street" somewhere in Maryland to see if any of them were actually Tampa Bay fans cheering against the Redskins. IN MARYLAND!

The George Mason thing hasn't gotten that bad, but it's darn close. I'm going to throw my cat at the television if I see one more reporter-that, 24 hours earlier, was covering actual news-interviewing inebriated dolts about the NCAA tournament:

Reporter: "Do you think George Mason can go all the way?"

Dude: "WHOOOOOOOOOOOAAAAAAAAAA! GO MASON! WHOOOOOOOOOOOOOAAAAAAAAAAAAGGGAAAA!"

Why don't we cover other events like this? Hey, look, they just car-bombed a bunch of our boys in Baghdad: let's grab a camera crew and get group reactions at TGI Friday's happy hour.

The most embarrassing part of this media overkill is that GMU is one of two local teams to make the Sweet 16, the other being Georgetown. Coverage of the Hoyas is a bit different: interviews with players, coaches, and video of practices. There's really none of that rah-rah stuff, no patrolling DC bars for yahoo fans.

Could it be because the Hoya bars are in DC, while the Mason bars are in the lilywhite suburbs of Virginia?

Naaah...

**

TO: THE PRINT MEDIA

RE: GAMBLING

From Michael Wilbon of the Washington Post, in the third paragraph about George Mason's amazing upset of North Carolina:

"Sunday's 65-60 victory over defending champion North Carolina — a school with twice as many national titles, four, as George Mason has tournament victories — is the biggest athletic accomplishment for the Fairfax commuter school and no doubt sent the brackets of many office pool players into the shredder."

Brackets into the shredder? Good lord. It's "the biggest athletic accomplishment for the Fairfax commuter school," and we're talking about the implications for the betting public?

Look, I know there's nothing illegal about an office pool, and I'm happily sitting in second place in mine. But can't March Madness gambling sort of linger in the background, like it does in football? I like the nod-and-wink approach to NFL betting, like those sly little comments Al Michaels makes near the end of a Monday Night game if one team is close to covering. I like the fact that the main outlets for football media don't acknowledge betting, but that fans know where to look to find that news. It's a little like porn: the more your significant other doesn't know about, the more salacious it feels to dabble in it.

I suppose what I'm asking for is for March Madness gambling to return to the background.

Unless it's the NIT, which should run Vegas lines at the bottom of the screen, because it'd give somebody a reason to watch.

Greg Wyshynski is the Features Editor for SportsFan Magazine in Washington, DC, and the Senior Sports Editor for The Connection Newspapers of Northern Virginia. His book "Glow Pucks and 10-Cent Beer: The 101 Worst Ideas in Sports History" will be published in spring 2006. His columns appear every Saturday on Sports Central. You can e-mail Greg at [email protected].