ASU brings the drama to selection show for NCAA Championship

Slimmed down and sensible, the CBS NCAA Basketball Championship Selection Show was a winner Sunday afternoon.

And dramatic, particularly if you’re an Arizona State University fan.

Spoiler alert: Coach Bobby Hurley’s Sun Devils made the tournament, chosen for a play-in game against St. John’s and its coach, Chris Mullen.

But it was an agonizing time getting there, with the match-up one of the last revealed on the live broadcast. Seth Davis, a CBS analyst, noted this. “Chris Mullen and Bobby Hurley — it was a long wait to get to this point in the show, but you are in the tournament,” Davis said, and then pointed out that their schools were the last two at-large teams chosen for the tournament. Talk about close calls. Unfortunately there was no televised watch party for ASU, although a DIY cellphone version was posted once the announcement was official.

Too bad.

CBS put cameras at a lot of locations, and it was a lot of fun to see, for instance, Gardner-Webb University go nuts when its name was called. Granted, they have to play the University of Virginia, seeded No. 1 in its region — but with UVa becoming the first No. 1 see to lose to a 16 last year, maybe GardnerWebb is feeling confident.

We were spared the depressing sight of teams sitting there despondent after not being chosen, which is fine.

It was plenty entertaining watching the reactions from those who did make it in.

For instance, Villanova, the defending champion, is a No. 6 seed this year, so the team’s reaction was something approaching polite applause — except for one guy, who jumped up, cheered, looked around and saw the muted reaction from his teammates and immediately planted himself back in his seat.

A Prairie View A&M player shouted, “We’re in!”

A Murray State player draped what looked like a WWE championship belt around one of his shoulders.

And points to Utah State for serving food, evidently. (One player held a paper plate that looked loaded with dinner).

CBS rolled out each of the four regions, one by one, between commercial breaks, and ended the broadcast with an interview with Bernard Muir, Stanford’s athletic director and the chairman of the selection committee.

The interview was a snoozer, as they always are — it’s not like Muir, or anyone, is ever going to say, “You know, we really screwed up the South Region.”

Davis, however, wasn’t shy about saying, for instance, that he was surprised the University of Michigan wasn’t a No. 1 seed (the Wolverines are a No. 2). And Clark Kellogg won my undying admiration for saying, at the outset, “I’m really curious about Wofford and Buffalo.”

(Quick timeout to once again note that Wofford is your best boutique pick; if the Terriers can get past Seton Hall, they’ll likely play Kentucky, a match-up several writers were already mentioning as a fun game. First things first, though.)

Let’s be honest, if CBS wanted to, it could dispense with the selection show in about 15 minutes. There’s not a lot of information involved, really. But where’s the fun (and advertising dollars) in that?

But this was a marked improvement over last year, when Turner networks, which alternates coverage of the selection, put on a bloated, two-hour affair that included revealing the teams

The length of that broadcast was insulting, the method idiotic.

Although, the way things played out this year, Arizona State probably wouldn’t have minded.