With all due respect to Weber State men's basketball coach Ron Abegglen and his charges, the chances are pretty strong that the Wildcats, the 14th seed in the West, are going to have the hammer dropped on them tonight by third seed North Carolina.
And Baltimore area viewers will probably have Michelle Dowd to thank for not having to see the Tar Heels run wild on the Wildcats.
It is Dowd, the programming administrator at Channel 13, Baltimore's CBS affiliate, who convinced the network that it would be better for area viewers to see tonight's George Washington-Indiana game, rather than Weber State-North Carolina, for particular reasons.
The most notable of them is the presence of GW guard Shawnta Rogers, the Atlantic 10 Player of the Year and a Baltimore native. Dowd's reasoning is that local hoop fans would rather see a home boy than an Atlantic Coast Conference team in a potential blowout.
"Just because there's an ACC team involved, there may not be a local interest. There's a really popular local player involved and a game like GW-Indiana could be more competitive," said Dowd.
Dowd also requested that the network send today's Creighton-Louisville game from Orlando, rather than the CBS-suggested Siena-Arkansas, as well as the Penn-Florida game from Seattle tonight, rather than Samford-St. John's.
In the latter instance, Dowd believes the Penn game might be more competitive and Baltimore viewers might have more interest in the Quakers than St. John's. In the former, she guesses that people will want to see who will potentially play Maryland in the second round on Saturday.
But she admits that it is all just a guess.
"We have to look at what we think will bring in the largest number of viewers," said Dowd.
Ultimately, that desire is at the heart of the series of intricate little dances that get played out in the 3 1/2-day period from when the field of 64 is announced and when the first game is played at noon today.
While the teams prepare for their first-round opponents, CBS officials and people like Dowd do verbal cha-chas about which games will work best for each market. Multiply those conversations by the more than 200 CBS affiliates and add in NCAA requirements about who must see what, and you can see how fancy those dance steps have to be.
And the stakes in those dances are pretty high, because the network is shelling out more than $200 million for the exclusive rights to bring the tournament to a nationwide, albeit carved-up, audience, in an attempt to produce big revenue and big, promotional opportunities for coming programming.
"Ultimately, we make the decision, but it's very much a collaborative process," said Michael Aresco, vice president of programming for CBS Sports.
The tournament is a big deal for local stations, too, for the same reason, so the negotiations between the affiliate and the network are critical.
They started Monday, when the network sent its ideas for games out to the stations, which are asked to respond as quickly as possible. As you might expect, CBS officials figure they've made good choices, but are amenable to listening to the stations.
"This is not the first time I've gotten what I didn't want and had to go back and ask for something else," said Dowd.
Thankfully, Dowd said, the network, which owns Channel 13, has become increasingly amenable to the station's requests, more so than four years ago, when the station first became a CBS affiliate.
Aresco cited an example yesterday in which the Minneapolis affiliate, located deep in the heart of Big Ten territory, asked for a Connecticut game because Huskies point guard Khalid El-Amin is a Minneapolis native. The network agreed with the request.
The only hard and fast rule about game carriage is in the matter of constant games, where local teams are involved. Those games must be carried to their conclusion, no matter how much of a blowout they may become.
In this case, Channel 13 must air today's Maryland-Valparaiso game (12: 20 p.m.) and tomorrow night's Mount St. Mary's-Michigan State contest, but that's OK with Dowd, for those are games she wanted to air anyway.
We'll know soon enough whether Dowd's basketball programming hunches will pay off, but here's something to consider: The last time Weber State was in the tournament four years ago, it was a 14 seed and knocked off third-seeded Michigan State.
Strange bedfellows
Bob Costas will do baseball games for ESPN this summer.
Don't worry; the cornerstone of NBC Sports hasn't bolted his contract with the Peacock, but Costas will join ESPN to do play-by-play on about six Wednesday night games during the stretch run.
Costas will be partnered with Joe Morgan during the games. He told MSNBC interviewer John Hockenberry that he's making the move, with NBC's approval, so he won't feel rusty during the postseason, as he said he felt last fall, when he leapt into playoff coverage without having done any regular-season games.
Costas and Morgan will call the World Series for NBC this October.
Week's ratings
The ratings for the top 10 most-watched sporting events on broadcast television in Baltimore during the past week (R-Rating; S-Share):
Event Day Ch. R/S
NCAA Selections Sun. 13 8.7/14
Md.-N.C. Sat. 54 7.9/17
Skating Fri. 2 7.7/13
Skating Sat. 11 7.0/11
Skating Sat. 2 6.2/10
"Road to Final 4" Sun. 13 5.3/10
Lakers-Jazz Sun. 11 5.0/8
Mich. St.-Ill. Sun. 13 4.4/9
Duke-N.C. Sun. 54 4.3/9
Md.-Fla. St. Fri. 54 3.8/11
Pub Date: 3/11/99