March Madness: Looking to avoid another leaked bracket, NCAA ups security
The anonymous Twitter poster who leaked last year’s NCAA men’s basketball tournament pairings halfway through the televised selection show on TBS is on the minds of a lot of people this weekend.
CBS Sports and Turner — broadcast partners whose deal for the tournament is worth nearly $20 billion through 2032 — remember the episode well, even if they still do not know how the Twitter user, who at the time occupied the handle @RICHIE, got his or her hands on the complete bracket.
And the NCAA said in a statement last month that it had “taken additional measures that we believe will prevent any premature release of information from reoccurring.”
“This includes,” the organization said, “reducing the number of entities and people who receive the bracket in advance.”
One upside of the incident? It has sparked changes to this year’s selec- tion show.
CBS is shortening Sunday’s program — which for many years lasted only a half-hour — to 90 minutes from two hours, and it will be frontloading the revealing of the bracket. A “vast majority” of the bracket will be released in the first 30 minutes, Sean McManus, chairman of CBS Sports, said last week. Most supplementary analysis and interviews will take place only after the bracket is re- vealed, according to David Levy, Turner’s president.
Levy acknowledged that the changes were not exclusively a response to the leak; they are also a reaction to the substantial outrage that last year’s drawn-out program engendered.
“I think we underestimated the viewers’ impatience,” he said last week.
That might have been why many fans embraced the leak, even if those affected most directly were not sure what to make of it.
Seth Davis, a college basketball analyst for CBS and Sports Illustrated, was on the air when it happened, focusing on the task at hand — analyzing the bracket as teams were revealed — and trying to make sure he did not inadvertently commit a similar spoiler.
“I’m always petrified about revealing something,” Davis said. “Like, if Syracuse comes up: ‘Oh, I can’t believe Syracuse got in and Rhode Island didn’t!’“
Preventing the bracket’s leak can seem trivial, not only in an era of ubiquitous social media and selfpublishing but also because CBS plans to release the full bracket not long after it is completed. But according to Neal Pilson, it matters a great deal to the rights holders. A former CBS Sports president, Pilson was the primary negotiator when his network pried the tournament’s broadcast rights from NBC in the early 1980s. The first live selection show aired on CBS in 1982.
“In terms of its allocation on rights fees, it’s obviously very small,” Pilson said.
“But it’s still an extremely important part of how we present the tournament.”
He added, “Our theory was that the tournament is like a movie: It has a beginning, a middle and an end.”
The revealing of the field, then, is the dynamic action-movie opening that sucks you in for the rest of the ride — assuming it is pulled off without a hitch.