The day before the game, Jay Bilas appears on “PTI” to discuss a comment Duke coach Mike Krzyzewski made about leadership in college basketball.espn images
It’s just after noon on Friday, Feb. 7, at the Dean E. Smith Center on the campus of the University of North Carolina and Jay Bilas is sipping from a slender can of flavored Perrier while opining on the misguided actions of the NCAA. At the moment, he’s hammering college sports’ governing body over its disdain for one-and-done men’s basketball players, standouts who head for the NBA after their freshman year.
This off-air commentary is not at all different from what he will say on camera — why send the message that building a relationship between a player and a college is bad just because it’s not for four years? — the following day.
Bilas, ESPN’s lead college basketball analyst, is surrounded by his on-air colleagues — anchor Rece Davis, former Virginia Tech coach Seth Greenberg and former Notre Dame standout and NBA veteran LaPhonso Ellis — and the production team behind the network’s traveling pregame show, “College GameDay.”
They’re in Chapel Hill for ESPN’s Feb. 8 broadcast of the latest installment in the Duke-North Carolina rivalry, the first of two regular-season meetings, the second of which is on Saturday. Bilas, as is typical of his winter weekends, will co-star in the hourlong “GameDay” telecast at 11 a.m. and then join play-by-play voice Dan Shulman courtside to call the headline game of the day.
Davis and Bilas have been constants on the basketball version of “GameDay” for 16 years. Greenberg joined in 2014 and Ellis is a rookie this season, replacing Jay Williams, who moved full-time to ESPN’s NBA coverage.
They’re gathered in the bowels of the Smith Center, where the UNC swimming and diving meeting room has been converted into a temporary “GameDay” headquarters. At any given time, 16 or 17 people fill the room, many gathered around a couple of rectangular tables pushed together, with others scattered on short sofas.
They pick at salads in plastic bowls and snack while running through topics and segments for the next day’s show from the court at the Smith Center. Everyone agrees social media as a source of the constant pressure and scrutiny players face is an important issue to be discussed. A rundown of likely top bracket seeds, a weekly feature, is reviewed. And there is mention of a potential snag that may prevent the teams from donning specially designed Nike uniforms — throwbacks celebrating the schools’ first meeting in 1920 — as planned. (The unis lack the required jersey numbers on the front, but are ultimately allowed by the NCAA.)
Friday, Feb. 7
1:04 p.m.
As the meeting ends, Bilas offers a pronouncement on the sentiment heading into Saturday’s game the next day. “We feel like we always feel — like this is our last show.”
1:05 p.m.
Eric Montross, a Tar Heels radio analyst who was the starting center on UNC’s 1993 national championship team, ambles in to tape an interview with Bilas for ESPN’s ACC Network show “Bald Men on Campus.”
Bilas, as college basketball fans know, played for Duke head coach Mike Krzyzewski in the mid-1980s, when Coach K was in the early stages of building what has become one of the sport’s greatest dynasties. Between those long-ago playing days, a role as a grad assistant under Krzyzewski in the early-1990s and what’s now a 25-year career at ESPN, Bilas knows just about everyone in college basketball, particularly in the ACC.
The shoot is scheduled for 1:30, but Montross and Bilas are happy to have a few extra minutes to catch up on family and basketball.
1:07 p.m.
Before Bilas and Montross can head for the custom studio inside the “GameDay”-wrapped bus parked outside the arena, Bilas first must pass inspection.
He heads for a chair in the corner of the room, where he puts on a haircut cape while simultaneously holding court with Montross, makeup artist Trish Ferguson and an SBJ reporter. She trims his sideburns, grooms his ears and looks for anything out of place.
Only Davis among the on-air crew sports a full head of hair; baldness is an endless source of amusement. Thus the instant volleys about the cape being superfluous. Bilas, despite Ferguson’s makeup brush zigging and zagging across his face, never stops talking, lobbing a steady barrage of zingers and self-deprecating darts before escaping the chair.
By 1:15, Montross and Bilas are on the arena elevator and taking a short stroll from the exit to the “GameDay” bus. The back half of the bus is a mobile studio where, among other things, the newly launched “Bald Men on Campus” is filmed as part of the 8-week “GameDay” schedule. It airs on ACC Network on Fridays at 9 p.m.
Crew members adjust microphone levels and camera angles, and talk back and forth with remote producers while Bilas, who is 6-foot-8, and Montross, who is 7-0, fold themselves into chairs in tight quarters while trying to look comfortable.
Bilas joins the rest of the “College GameDay” team, Rece Davis (left), LaPhonso Ellis and Seth Greenberg.espn images
Some of the best moments of their conversation are off-hand observations made before the interview begins. Montross mentions “the thing that no Carolina fans wants to know” is that, in the late 1990s, while playing in the NBA for the Detroit Pistons, former Duke nemesis Christian Laettner was traded to the team and “it was like we had been teammates the whole time.”
Montross’ anecdote triggers Bilas’ memory. He was on the Duke coaching staff when Laettner led the Blue Devils to consecutive national championships in 1991 and ’92. He recalls playing tennis with Laettner and the 6-11 center’s graceful athleticism. As a diversion at practice, Laettner would walk the length of the court, baseline to baseline, on his hands.
“The two things that were craziest that I remember seeing were [Laettner] doing that and Kevin Love could stand underneath one basket to the side where you inbound the ball and chest pass the ball into the other basket,” Bilas tells Montross.
Love, now in his 12th season in the NBA, was in his first and only season at UCLA in 2007-08 when Bilas attended a practice while on assignment for ESPN. As practice ended, then-UCLA coach Ben Howland off-handedly mentioned Love’s court-length feat to Bilas, who scoffed. Howland tapped a manager to ask Love to return to the court, where Love proceeded to sink six of 10 court-length shots with chest passes.
As the interview ends, Bilas thanks Montross “because you’ve made great choices in your life. Not only the choice to attend the University of North Carolina, play for Dean Smith, but the choice to come on this show. And the choice to be bald. Because for you it is a choice. You could have hair on top of your head if you wanted. For some of us, it’s not a choice.”
2:27 p.m.
Anybody who follows Bilas on Twitter knows his routine of quoting lyrics by rapper Jeezy (who later name-checked Bilas in a song). He also wields that platform as a way of calling out what he views as NCAA hypocrisy. In 2013, as former UCLA basketball star Ed O’Bannon fought the NCAA in court over what has come to be known as name-image-likeness compensation, Bilas posted a series of tweets showing that by entering the names of then-active college football stars Tajh Boyd, Jadeveon Clowney and Johnny Manziel in a Google search, their respective jerseys would appear for sale on the ShopNCAA online store. That exercise cut through the NCAA’s long-running argument that any connection between jerseys featuring a particular number were not being sold to capitalize on the popularity of a specific player.
Bilas remains busy on Twitter, but his daughter, Tori — who was a “GameDay” runner while in school at Duke — encouraged him to up his social media game by seeking student expertise each weekend. At North Carolina, it comes from Carrigan Bain, a grad student in the sports administration master’s program. She’s compiling bits and clips for stories on Instagram (a clip of his grooming session with Ferguson is accompanied by Bilas’ greeting to the stylist: “She does this to torture me”). Bain and Krista Meyers, who is on a separate social media mission for ACC Network, follow the crew to and from various shoots.
Meyers asks Bilas, Ellis and Greenberg to shoot a quick segment walking down the front steps outside the Smith Center for an online promo — an assignment Bilas improvises by pretending to stumble halfway down without losing control of his ever-present Starbucks coffee cup. She asks for an encore to make sure everything looks good and, with that, it’s back inside the arena.
Former Tar Heel Eric Montross stops in for a taping of “Bald Men on Campus.”espn images
2:33 p.m.
Next, Bilas heads to the media room, where a small gaggle of reporters asks him why the Tar Heels are struggling (North Carolina entered the Feb. 8 game unranked with a 10-12 record, while Duke was No. 7 at 19-3), who could be coach Roy Williams’ heir apparent (Bilas can’t fathom the idea) and how players should weigh whether to declare for the NBA draft.
3-4 p.m.
One of Bilas’ favorite aspects of his job is watching the home team practice the day before the game. Williams, who was an assistant under Dean Smith from 1978 to 1988, hews to his late mentor’s basketball principles. Or, as Bilas puts it, “They have been running practice here the same way for 40 years now.” Bilas is eager to watch how the Tar Heels put their tallest players through the paces: “The way they coach and teach their big guys is the best I’ve ever seen.”
4:05 p.m.
Bilas leaves practice so he can appear on “PTI.” Co-hosts Frank Isola and Tony Kornheiser quiz him about Coach K’s recent comments that college basketball lacks a true voice. With his calm and considered approach, his decades spent around the game as a player, coach, TV analyst and parent of a player — his son Anthony was a walk-on at Wake Forest — Bilas is frequently mentioned as a possible college basketball commissioner, should such a role ever exist. As for Krzyzewski’s remarks, “I think what he was talking about was the overall leadership not only in the game, but I think it extends to college athletics, period. That’s the biggest problem I have. Football was taken away from the NCAA years ago and it’s very healthy and I think those two things are related. …”
5:30 p.m.
Back in the temporary ESPN headquarters in the swimming and diving meeting room, Bilas sits for a 70-minute interview with SBJ. Over the past seven days, he has been part of “GameDay” at Auburn on Feb. 1, called the Auburn-Kentucky game the same night, and then gone on to Allen Fieldhouse for Texas-Kansas (Feb. 3) and Crisler Center in Ann Arbor for Ohio State-Michigan the following night. Forty-eight hours later, he arrived in Chapel Hill. All of which is manageable, he says, because Erin Knight, the production manager, knows how to make the trains run on time. “Erin’s theory is these guys will shut up if they’re caffeinated and fed,” he says, hoisting a cup of coffee in salute. “We’re like zoo animals.”
7:30-9:45 p.m.
Because this game is so close for Bilas — a 2-½-hour drive from his Charlotte home — his wife, Wendy, has joined him for the weekend. They parked their dog at the Barker Lounge on Friday morning and then drove to Chapel Hill.
Both Bilases are part of the night before “GameDay” dinner, a group outing to the City Kitchen brasserie that includes on-air teammates Davis, Greenberg and Ellis, plus game producer Jeff Dufine and Bilas’ Instagram mentor, Carrigan Bain.
10 p.m.-midnight
Bilas retreats to his hotel room for more “GameDay” and Duke-UNC prep.
Bilas, Greenberg and Ellis shared a pregame laugh with UNC head coach Roy Williams as the countdown to the game continued.espn images
Saturday, Feb. 8
8 a.m.
The “GameDay” crew returns to their swimming and diving headquarters at the bottom of the Smith Center for a final rundown of the 11 a.m. show. Between now and then, they will take turns going back and forth to the on-court set, where they will appear on various editions of “SportsCenter” to preview the day of basketball ahead.
9:27 a.m.
The Smith Center doors open for students and other fans, providing the live audience backdrop that gives “GameDay” its energy. Students thunder down the arena steps to get the seats nearest the court. They have signs at the ready — “Coach K Eats Raw Spaghetti” reads one — and many wear State Farm giveaway “hats” that resemble an upside down rim and basketball net.
9:30 a.m.
Gone, for the on-air crew, are the sweaters and casual wear of Friday, replaced by suits or, at minimum, shirt and tie. No matter the ensemble, it’s invariably completed with sneakers.
Geoff Brown, the “GameDay” producer, is most definitely not wearing a suit, but Bilas and others have decided he should be. Brown beams: “Jay’s gonna buy me a suit.”
With yet another Starbucks in hand, Bilas begins pondering what might be — wait for it — suitable. Davis references the old Men’s Wearhouse tagline made famous by founder George Zimmer in old heavy-rotation TV ads: “You’re gonna like the way you look.”
Bilas responds: “Nobody else will, but you will. …”
9:49 a.m.
Bilas heads to the court for a live “Outside the Lines” segment with Jeremy Schaap. The topic: Bob Knight, who retired in 2008 from Texas Tech with the most career wins in NCAA men’s basketball (Krzyzewski now owns the record) but who is best known for his 29-year run at Indiana that included three national titles but ended with his firing in 2000. Later this afternoon, Knight is expected to return to the Hoosiers’ Assembly Hall for the first time in 20 years, a development Bilas says makes sense for all concerned now that Knight has been living near the Bloomington campus again and seems to have made peace with his legacy.
9:57 a.m.
Time for a Tobacco Road “SportsCenter” intro from Chapel Hill. Crew members tell the students to get loud when the cameras roll, with Bilas walking right in front of them in the aisle to hype the Tar Heels-Blue Devils matchup. On cue, they stomp and scream.
10:15 a.m.
Seated alone on the “GameDay” set, with the crowd behind him, Bilas appears on “SportsCenter” to preview Duke-North Carolina. He assures Hannah Storm, anchoring from ESPN’s Connecticut headquarters, that he is always welcome in Chapel Hill despite having played for Coach K at Duke.
“I was responsible for more Carolina wins over Duke than Michael Jordan, so they’re very nice to me,” Bilas tells her. For the record, the Blue Devils went 3-6 against the Tar Heels during Bilas’ four years at Duke, including a 1-4 mark in two seasons against Jordan.
10:30 a.m.
Groups of VIPs and select fans line up for a steady stream of on-set photos at the “GameDay” desk with Bilas, Davis, Ellis and Greenberg. Wendy Bilas greets crew members and takes a seat across the court to watch the show.
Bilas and play-by-play voice Dan Shulman called another classic UNC-Duke game.espn images
11 a.m.-noon
Social media, better governance of college basketball, the anticipated top seeds — almost all of the topics previewed and debated 23 hours ago roll out smoothly as Davis steers his analysts in and out of segments and commercials. Every mention of the Tar Heels elicits a roar, as intended.
2 p.m.
Bilas breaks off to watch Carolina’s pregame shoot-around, chatting with Williams to get a sense of the mood for tonight’s game.
4:30 p.m.
The “GameDay” cast is back in the swimming and diving room in the Smith Center, where two large flat-screen TVs show men’s games airing on ESPN and ESPN2. With tipoff approaching, Bilas is getting ready for the game while Davis, Ellis and Greenberg will head to the set for a halftime segment during the Virginia-Louisville game.
4:50 p.m.
As players from both teams take the court for an initial round of warmups, Bilas chats with the assistant coaches from Duke and UNC.
5:10 p.m.
Another cup of Starbucks in hand, Bilas greets Charlie Jones, the arena tunnel supervisor known for his Carolina blue blazer and warm smile. Bilas calls him “the nicest man in the world” and makes his way around the court in the way of a mayor: stopping for photos, shaking hands, waving hello. Finally, he reaches the cramped courtside ESPN broadcast area, where he stashes his binder of handwritten notes (preferred defensive rotations, offensive tendencies and so on) and then makes another survey of the court.
6:05 p.m.
Shulman and Bilas are on-court for a final quick preview before tipoff. Bilas says Carolina is better than its record or performance indicates, but will have to play an exceptional game to beat the Blue Devils. Duke comes into the game as a 7.5-point favorite, but the Tar Heels play inspired ball right from the opening tip, and lead most of the way.
6:53 p.m.
“Pretty good half,” Bilas says upon walking into the swimming and diving room for intermission. North Carolina leads Duke, 44-35. Bilas, after stuffing some throat lozenges in his pocket for the second half, nods at a mention of the score and says, “Always expect the unexpected.”
8:48 p.m.
Even expecting the unexpected makes it hard to imagine what happens in the game’s final moments. The Blue Devils come from 13 down in the last four minutes and force overtime when sophomore guard Tre Jones intentionally misses a free throw, runs down the rebound beyond the three-point line, and drills an 18-foot jumper. In the extra period, Carolina leads by five with 20 seconds to go when Duke does it again, rallying to tie the score and getting possession after rebounding a missed Jones free throw. He fires an air ball but freshman Wendell Moore, standing near the basket, grabs it out of midair and puts it back as time expires.
“What an amazing finish,” Bilas tells the ESPN audience. “Just remarkable.”
Minutes later, Bilas and his wife make their way out of the Smith Center to a waiting car. When he wakes up on Sunday, Bilas will flip on his tablet and start studying video. His next assignment — Duke vs. Florida State, in Durham — is just two days away, part of ESPN’s Big Monday coverage.
Somebody call Starbucks.
Erik Spanberg writes for the Charlotte Business Journal, an affiliated publication.
