With the looming potential for a war in Iraq, advertisers and media buyers are nervous about the possibility of NCAA tournament pre-emptions due to breaking news, and about a general lack of national focus on sports during a time of international crisis.
CBS has offered airlines the right to pull their NCAA advertising packages if war begins, and at least two airlines signed deals that included that contingency. The network also lost two major travel-related advertisers who bought time during the tournament last year, United Airlines and American Express.
Meanwhile, the network's programming department has been feverishly devising a Plan B to turn to if CBS has to switch to news programming while games are being played. In that event, games will move to cable network TNN and other Viacom-owned cable channels.
If pre-emptions happen during the opening round, when as many as four games are played at once, CBS will have to employ multiple cable networks because cable channels don't have the capability of regionalizing their feeds the way broadcast affiliates do. TNN has a primary feed and a West Coast feed, but CBS will need to find at least two other channels, possibly BET or Nickelodeon.
There's even a chance that ESPN will carry some tournament games. CBS and ESPN have worked out several agreements related to coverage of the tournament, with ESPN refraining from airing a selection show that competes with CBS and also lending some on-air talent in exchange for better access to tournament venues.
Sean McManus, president of CBS Sports, said there is a possibility that ESPN will take a spillover feed, but that is unlikely because ESPN has its own programming obligations and may have to pick up pre-empted sports programming from its sister network, ABC.
The small silver lining of the games moving to cable is that consumers would have a rare chance to switch from game to game on different channels, something they can normally do only if they buy a DirecTV NCAA tournament subscription. But even with the extra coverage, CBS expects to take a ratings hit if games are preempted on the broadcast network. "Programs always rate less on cable than they do on network TV," McManus said.
