A cease-fire in the bracket wars

Office pools ready? GENTLEMEN, START YOUR PENCILS! Surely you'll watch the unveiling of the NCAA Tournament bracket on CBS, since Selection Sunday has been designated a demilitarized zone.

For the 20th year, The Eye sees and shows the field first (6 p.m. ET), a perk that comes with spending $6 billion-something for March Madnesses through 2013. But ESPN--which traditionally retaliates with brackets minutes (or seconds) behind and pacesetting analysis--is conditionally surrendering the time slot. As agreed in a summit between CBS and ESPN, presumably at the Appomattox Sheraton: ESPN will keep its selection show in the holster until 7 p.m.

CBS usually tripled ESPN's rating, but Mike Aresco, CBS programmer, says the obvious: "You always prefer having an exclusive window." The window now opens to a one-hour selection show, made possible by the NCAA releasing brackets 30 minutes earlier. In the old CBS half-hour format, there was hardly time for Greg Gumbel, Clark Kellogg, Jim Nantz, Billy Packer, Bonnie Bernstein, a roundtable and Ray Romano to recite matchups/throw to commercials/sit on the chair of the selection committee. Now they'll take their sweet time.

What took so long for CBS to go 60 minutes? 60 Minutes. Len DeLuca, ESPN strategist who programmed 15 NCAAs at CBS, says: "You can delay that institution past 7 p.m.--for NFL. For any other sport you get a call from Don Hewitt."

Think what Selection Sunday was before CBS made it a catch phrase. "Puffs of white or gray smoke from Kansas City," DeLuca recalls. It took arm-twisting for the NCAA to give brackets to TV. (In 1980, Bob Ley hosted the first selection show ever. It was on ESPN.) Upon getting the 1982 Tournament, CBS was handed the List of 64 and guarded it like a final Survivor vote.

Now it can be told how ESPN got those brackets: It simply copied 'em as quick as CBS aired 'em. CBS could complain, but the brackets become public domain the second CBS reports them. "A show going against ours was good for the sport, not CBS," says Aresco, who started his career at ESPN. CBS got revenge in 1990, nuking ESPN out of the NCAAs by buying rights to every game.

This year, per its surrender, ESPN is back in the Tournament biz. It gets the 64-seed vs. 65-seed contest, plus a Final Four Friday show--a decent trade for the champions of college basketball, whose Championship Week climaxes on Selection Sunday, co-starring a women's selection show and A Season on the Brink.

During CBS' selection show, SportsCenter will be on. Nothing prevents those guerrillas from copying and airing the brackets in the name of news, ASAP.

FRITZ QUINDT

fquindt@sportingnews.com

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