CBS in Fine Form as Showtime Tips Off

NEW YORK -- For a guy who drew to an inside straight, Sean McManus displayed his best poker face Thursday.

McManus, the president of CBS Sports, orchestrated the network's telecasts of the first day of the NCAA men's basketball tournament brilliantly, deftly moving the nation from one nail-biting finish to another.

And yet, McManus refrained from gloating, nearly pulling out the hoary cliché, "We take these telecasts one at a time."

"It's been a good start, but it's a marathon, obviously," McManus said after the first two groupings of games. "I don't get too excited if we have a great first window and I don't get disappointed if we have a bad first window. It's a really long tournament."

"But it's so wide open this year that even though we're lacking some of the big traditional teams, it's got the feeling of a tournament that's going to have a lot of surprises and a lot of people on the edge of their seat and a lot of higher seeds fighting for their lives."

That last part could accurately describe CBS, as it waits anxiously to find out whether it will keep the tournament, but more on that later.

If this year is the last of the network's 29-year run of tournament broadcasts, let the record reflect that CBS began the end in fine fashion.

The drama, to be sure, came from the players and coaches in four arenas around the country, but the CBS employees, scattered all over sets and control rooms in the network's Broadcast Center on West 57th Street in Manhattan, made sure you saw every important moment of that drama.

In a breathtaking sequence near the end of the first set of Thursday afternoon's games, CBS moved viewers from the end of regulation and both overtimes of the Florida-BYU contest, to the end of regulation of the Notre Dame-Old Dominion game to the remarkable drama at the end of regulation and the overtime of the Villanova-Robert Morris tilt.

At the center of those moves was a troika, led by McManus and flanked by Harold Bryant, the vice president of production and Michael Aresco, the executive vice president of programming.

During each day of the tournament, the three men occupy a private room at the Broadcast Center, watching all the games and making the calls on when to move from one to the next. They must choose not only when to bounce from close game to close game, when they happen, but also when to take audiences from blowouts to other games.

One of the things McManus has done since taking over the helm of the network's sports division in 1996, is ensure that when the network moves from one close game to another that there are no commercials to interrupt the flow and the drama.

"It used to be when we switched to a buzzer-beater and there was a timeout, we go to a commercial," said McManus, who also runs CBS News. "Now, we ping-pong back and forth. And we avoided that [Thursday]. We don't ever go to commercial."

Once the call is made, Eric Mann, the network's chief studio producer, sends the order out from a central control room to one of 10 other rooms that are connected to the four game sites.

On the other side is when to shift out of blowouts. Aresco said the three of them start talking about moving at some point during the first half once it appears clear that one team will dominate.

"Even if it's in the first half, we'll start thinking about it, and if gets beyond 15, 17 or 18 [points], we'll probably do it," said Aresco, who is in charge of all college programming for CBS Sports and CBS College Sports Network.

"But it's still a feel. You've got to know who's playing, whether you think the other team can come back and quickly. And remember you can always come back to a game. It's not the danger zone that some people think it is because you can come back. It's not like you're gone for good."

Indeed, CBS has the country divided into areas that it calls constant and flex for the purpose of moving. Constant zones are generally those surrounding the two schools involved in a game.

For instance, for Friday's Morgan State-West Virginia game, which tips off at 12:15 p.m. EDT, CBS affiliates in the states of Maryland and West Virginia, as well as in Washington, D.C., Roanoke, Va. and Pittsburgh will be locked into that game, no matter the score, on the assumption that this is the area of most interest.

That game will lead off the day's package, followed 10 minutes later by Minnesota-Xavier, which most of the nation that doesn't have a rooting interest in Morgan State-West Virginia will be moved to, followed at 12:30 p.m EDT by the Cornell-Temple game.

But even markets that are in a constant zone can be switched, for a brief time, to games that have a dramatic finish.

"It really works because of the experience of the people who are doing it," McManus said. "That's [studio host] Greg Gumbel, Eric Mann and the people here who have a really good feel for when to switch. Even though you get burned sometimes and you can't control what happens, it's a pretty good system and I think we make the right decision most of the time."

The fact that CBS has honed the fine art of keeping the country happy in the midst of madness makes the notion that the network could lose the property that it has been so closely associated with for nearly three decades a sad one.

Yet, the reality is that if the NCAA does, as expected, opt out of the final three years of its 11-year deal with CBS after the tournament, leaving an estimated $2.1 billion on the table in search of more money in an uncertain market, the tournament will move from its familiar place and into the hands of executives who will have to learn immediately what Sean McManus already knows.

For the record, McManus, who says he has been in either the studio or the Final Four production truck for every game since he took over, claims he has not really thought about the possibility of the NCAA pulling up stakes.

"We're really focused on this year and not thinking about any contractual negotiations or anything other than this year," McManus said.

And when you're holding an inside straight, it's probably better to focus on the hand you have rather than worry about the one to come.