Unanimous national No. 1 Virginia will be among the schools awaiting the bracket reveal on Selection Sunday. (Photo by Andy Lyons/Getty Images)
NEW YORK — For 36 years, the routine of college basketball fans on Selection Sunday has been the same, tuning into CBS at 6 p.m. Eastern time for the big bracket reveal. This weekend, however, the show is moving to TBS for the first time and will be preceded by a four-hour social preshow, Social Madness, that will air on YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, NCAA.com and Turner-owned Bleacher Report.
“Whenever you move something — in this case, network to network — there’s an X factor,” Turner Sports chief content officer Craig Barry said, adding: “It was important to hopefully create a vehicle that had saturation that would create awareness.”
Turner created similar programming for opening night of the NBA season, netting 53 million impressions and six million video views on its Facebook and Twitter accounts. The March Madness version will feature Andy Katz, Steve Smith, Seth Davis, Brendan Haywood and Casey Stern as on-air talent, while also airing pre-packaged content from several campuses of tournament-bound teams.
Barry likened the NCAA Selection Show to the NFL Draft as the two most anticipated sports information shows every year and saw more opportunity for engagement.
“I believe in the evolution of content into the conversation, it’s more experiential for people to engage with — that viewers are essentially connected,” he said. “March Madness is all about fans, so what platform of content can we create where people could engage leading up to the Selection Show? That’s the main thrust of it, to create the buzz, to create the conversation, to create a destination of engagement so hopefully we can get some momentum going to the show.”
Of the 32 automatic bids, 27 will have been awarded before Sunday, granting Turner’s producers ample chance to prepare material and solicit contributions from those schools, as well as provide the requisite analysis of their chances and speculation about the at-large bids.
“Whenever you have that much real estate, you have the opportunity to be extremely dynamic and diverse around content,” Barry said.
This is the eighth year that Turner and CBS have collaborated on broadcasting the tournament with CBS Sports chairman Sean McManus saying the prior productions look distinctly “retro” in hindsight.
“We have new elements, which is why this partnership is working so well,” he said. “We’re not afraid to innovate and try new things while still keeping the basic knowledge that we have.”
The Selection Show itself will have a different format, with TBS revealing the 68 entrants to the tournament in the first segment of the show but not revealing the seeds of bracket placement until later in the hour. Barry said Turner built a new set for the show, which will have a live audience of about 300 people who were invited through an internal company email.
