Cbs Earns Mixed Review
A few final thoughts on the Final Four.
An estimated 50 million people watched all or part of the NCAA championship game, with CBS earning an 18.9 rating and a 31 share for Monday night’s Arizona victory over Kentucky.
The game was the highest-rated CBS prime-time broadcast since the 1995 NCAA championship game. It was also the highest-rated sports broadcast of the year on any network, excluding the NFL.
It’s probably the latest thing in promotion, but CBS’s shameless plugs for its programming were a bit much. It’s one thing to show snippets of a show. It’s an entirely different matter when viewers are forced to see where the stars of the shows are sitting in the stands. It’s tacky and suggests desperation.
Thank goodness for CBS commentator Clark Kellogg. The former Ohio State standout and Indiana Pacer didn’t gush all over former UCLA coach John Wooden during a halftime interview. While Pat O’Brien resembled a child on Santa Claus’s lap (“Boy, this is great,” he would later conclude), Kellogg asked a relevant question about what Wooden looked for in players.
Wooden answered that he is and was a great fan of passing and he looked for players who could get the ball to other players with a basic pass.
Based on what we see from many college and even professional basketball players, Wooden might find slim pickings these days.
Women rate highly
ESPN scored a 4 rating, or an estimated 2.85 million households, for its coverage of the NCAA women’s championship. Tennessee’s victory over Old Dominion was the highest-rated and most-watched women’s game in ESPN history and the most-watched NCAA basketball game (men’s or women’s) on ESPN or ESPN2 since 1990.
Picking up a prize
Cheers to Aaron Plettner, 15, from Sutton, Neb. (pop. 1,400). Unlike most of the well-paid basketball analysts, he picked Arizona to win the NCAA tournament and was nearly flawless in his overall predictions.
Plettner, a freshman at Sutton High School, beat 176,475 registered entrants in the ESPNET SportsZone Tournament. Plettner wins a four-day trip to the 1998 Final Four in San Antonio, plus $300 cash.