The NCAA Selection Show is scrapping last year's awful format
The 2018 NCAA Tournament Selection Show was a disaster.
Wait, that might be putting it too nicely.
It was an hours-long, unnecessary bore that somehow managed to make March Madness — the most exciting tournament in sports — seem dull. It brought every college basketball fan together in anger and annoyance, which was a skill previously thought to be monopolized by the NCAA infractions committee.
Fortunately for everyone, the show’s format will be changing back to its typical style this year when it goes live a week from Sunday. Instead of unveiling the 68-team field in alphabetical order before unveiling the actual bracket, the show will announce the participating schools matchup-by-matchup.
The Basketball Gods have offered this March a truly great omen.
Some (very good) sports media news:
CBS will be changing the NCAA Selection Show from last year's broadcast on TBS. No rolling out all the teams in alphabetical order this year. They will return to unveiling the teams in brackets when you first see them on the screen.— Richard Deitsch (@richarddeitsch) March 10, 2019
So what brought about the change?
Well, it likely had to do with last year’s show falling to an all-time ratings low. That includes 2016 when the bracket leaked on Twitter. The 2018 selection show earned an overnight rating of just 1.6, down nearly half the viewers from 2017.
The show was thrown into chaos just minutes into the opening when the audio and video very obviously didn’t sync up.
Of course, the point of having a selection show at all is to capture the attention of viewers for as long as they can, so CBS can sell more ads and promote its brand, so we should expect some type strategy to stretch the show out for at least an hour. But there’s no denying the right, and most dramatic, way to unveil the field of 68 is line by line. At least now we know we’ll get that.
Happy Bracket Season.
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Blake Schuster is a writer for Yahoo Sports. Have a tip? Email him at blakeschuster@yahoo.com or follow him on Twitter!
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