NCAA Tournament television schedule announced – cable nets to have major presence

Cable will make TV Madness less maddening [USA Today]

Last April, Turner Sports and CBS announced they were teaming up as broadcast partners for the NCAA's marquee event, the men's basketball tournament. The deal, which covers 14 years and cost $10.8 billion, means that each tournament game will be broadcast live for the first time in the 73-year history of the event.

At the time of the announcement, Greg Shaheen, the NCAA's interim executive vice president of championships and business strategies, said, “I think people won't understand until March how prominent their (Turner's) role is going to be in this agreement."

After yesterday's television schedule announcement, I think they may begin to have a better understanding much sooner than that.

The schedule reveals that three of Turner’s cable channels (TBS, TNT and truTV) will host all 4 play-in games, 24 of the 32 first round games (including many of the higher seeded games), 9 of the 16 second round games and half of the Sweet 16 games. In all, 41 of the tournament's 69 games will be seen exclusively on a cable channel.

One of the things that stands out about the announcement is, based on the brackets, a viewer wouldn’t see an advancing tournament #1 seed on CBS until the Elite 8. And if the seeding turns out as several of the “bracketologists” have predicted, it looks likely that several of UK, UofL and OSU’s tournament games may be on cable.

All of this signifies a tremendous shift in how we’ll be watching one of the most popular events in all of sports this March. It also demonstrates the continued development and growing influence of cable networks across all programming platforms, especially when you consider that the tournament’s title game will begin alternating between Turner’s cable channels and CBS in 2016.

As the individual games are announced, we’ll be sure to have the channel lineup handy for customers on our website at SportsOnInsight.com.

And when March Madness does kick-off, don’t forget to tune into the only daily program dedicated to Kentucky sports, Kentucky Sports TV with Matt Jones airing each weeknight at 7:30 pm and 11:00 pm on Insight’s cn|2.

We know how much our customers love sports, especially college basketball. In fact, the Louisville television market led the nation in NCAA tournament viewing last year (averaging a 16.6 rating through the first 2 rounds) and has led the country in average viewership for the NCAA championship game in each of the past 10 years.

Insight has always worked to provide our customers with the best sports coverage and this announcement is further reflection of that commitment.

Comments

[Brant]

Seriously, are we not going to get TruTV in HD here in Louisville!?!? Seriously? Why does Northern KY and Lexington have it, but we don't? You can't even give it to us temporarily for this tournament?! Come on Insight!

[Nate Hiatt]

Mike, are they still putting all of the tourney online for free?

[Brock]

I sure hope we have TruTV in HD in Louisville by tournament time so that we can view all the games on all the stations in HD! That would be excellent especially considering we were the #1 market for college basketball viewing last year as you mention in your post.