CBS earned a 4.2 overnight rating for its NCAA Men's Basketball Tournament Selection Show yesterday, down 5% from a 4.4 rating last year. Louisville led all markets with a 17.6 local rating, followed by Dayton with a 12.6 rating. Rounding out the top five were Columbus (11.6), Cincinnati (11.5) and K.C. (11.4). Meanwhile, CBS earned a 2.4 overnight for the Big Ten title game yesterday, which saw Michigan State defeat Michigan. The figure is down 20% from a 3.0 overnight for the Ohio State-Wisconsin matchup last year. ESPN earned a 2.2 overnight for the Virginia-Duke ACC Tournament title game yesterday, up 38% from a 1.6 overnight for the Miami-North Carolina matchup in '13. The net also earned a 1.1 overnight for the premiere of "Requiem for the Big East" from 9:00-11:00pm ET, which aired immediately following the "Bracketology" special. That overnight is down slightly from the net's 1.2 rating for "Survive and Advance" in the same time period last year. In its first year airing the Big East Tournament final, FS1 drew a 0.5 overnight on Saturday night for the Providence-Creighton matchup (Austin Karp, Assistant Managing Editor).
A SELECT FEW: SPORTS ON EARTH's Aaron Gordon writes CBS' Clark Kellogg, Doug Gottlieb and Seth Davis during yesterday's selection show offered "short bursts of commentary that never detracted from the proceedings; they only spoke when they had something to say, a novel concept in sports broadcasting." The trio "resisted the urge to overplay their hands." As a result, it "actually meant something" when Davis "audibly emoted" that Louisville got a No. 4 seed. However, the more CBS "focused on the committee's decisions, the more the fabricated nature of the event came to light." The "best thing a Selection Sunday broadcast can do is draw attention away from this relative arbitrariness and toward the excitement ahead." The "easiest way to accomplish this is to make it all whoosh by" (SPORTSONEARTH.com, 3/17).
BLUEJAY WAY? SI.com's Richard Deitsch wrote it was "not a good Friday night" for FS1 this past weekend, as fans watching Creighton-Xavier on Cox Cable in the Omaha market "were inadvertently switched to a Pac-12 semifinal." An FS1 spokesperson said, "Our plan was to take the state of California to the start of the Stanford-UCLA game on Fox Sports 1 if the Xavier-Creighton game ran long. When the switch was made, it seems that Cox Cable in Omaha inadvertently switched to the Pac-12 game as well. We don't know why or how, and we're investigating. In order to get Omaha back to the Xavier-Creighton game as quickly as possible, we had to take all those seeing Stanford-UCLA back to the remainder of Xavier-Creighton" (SI.com, 3/16).
