Fans Surf For Hoops Scoops College Basketball Pools Bring March Madness To The World Wide Web
Nearly 1 million fans an hour clicked on the NCAA’s web site Thursday, getting instant updates of each basketball tournament score and each player’s shots and rebounds, fouls and assists.
Another million were doing the same at a CBS Internet setting, smashing network records in their hope of cashing in on thousands of dollars in prizes.
The real action, however, began long before the games did, when untold numbers of Americans traded in their smudged paper copies of the betting pool for what they hoped would be a computer-assisted edge in calculating their picks.
March Madness has crossed over into cyberspace.
And as it has, the office computer nerd may have gained an insurmountable edge in the annual office pool.
“We set a record at 1 p.m. today for total usage. It doubled our highest day in our history, which was Monday,” Ross Levinsohn, vice president at CBS SportsLine, the network’s cyberspace show, said Thursday. “It’s a trend-setting day not just for CBS SportsLine but for the Internet as a whole.”
Have some of those people been logging on for betting tips? Levinsohn, like most Internet executives, was reluctant to say. But he did acknowledge that “every office in the country is doing an office pool, and the Internet, newspapers and TV all help in that pool… . We used to run betting information but we no longer do it, with the tournament.”
Other web sites don’t have any pretense about why they are there. “Odds & Analysis” lets you “back up your picks with a comprehensive package of historical statistics and a detailed matchup analysis.” “The Winning Way” says “we specialize in beating the point spread.” And scores of chat sites encourage you to compare your reasoning on who’ll win with that of thousands of fans nationwide.
Then there are the software packages that let you and your friends create your own “league” and enter your picks into a grid that looks like the one you used to scribble out on paper, then helps you keep track of each person’s progress as the games go on. If you don’t want to pay for that software, you can choose from web sites where the program is ready to run.
“Our site, March Madness Picks, says at the very top that it is ‘for amusement only,”’ said John Freund of The Affinity Group, a Pennsylvania software consulting firm. “I can’t say people are not using it to bet.”
The trend of betting on the Internet comes at a time when more and more doubts are being raised about gambling, whether it’s in a casino, at a state-sponsored lottery or at sporting events. Most critics concede, however, that cracking down on Internet gambling is as futile as trying to break up office March Madness pools.
Freund’s site, like many others, encourages viewers to enter their picks in a contest it is running, with a $1,000 award for the winner. “We’re looking to get into the web fantasy sports arena,” he explained, “and this is a way to test some of our internal technologies.”
ESPN is running a substantially bigger contest on its NCAA web site, and it received 176,476 sets of picks for the men’s tournament by Thursday’s deadline, with entries for the women’s already reaching 25,000. Winners in the two divisions will be sent with a friend to next year’s Final Four for their division.
But when it comes to cyberspace, the big events for ESPN, CBS and the NCAA have to do with the information each has assembled on the games and what lies behind them.
CBS SportsLine, for instance, has statistics on any team for any year. It has a live scoreboard that lets you follow the action as it’s happening, updated by the second for each game. And afterwards, you can listen to Pat O’Brien, Jim Nantz and other commentators live on your computer, or watch animated characters reenact the day’s best plays.
The NCAA’s site offers equally impressive features, from radio hookups with local stations and home-team announcers, to game stats and summaries.
“We don’t want to discourage anyone from watching TV … but this complements TV coverage,” said Wally Renfro, constituent communications chief at the NCAA. “It gives you things TV can’t.”
The fact that 5 million fans already had tapped into the league’s web site by midafternoon Thursday “is pretty extraordinary,” Renfro added.
xxxx POPULARITY SOARS ESPN is running a substantially bigger contest on its NCAA web site, and it received 176,476 sets of picks for the men’s tournament by Thursday’s deadline, with entries for the women’s already reaching 25,000.