First weekend's rating go down

The NCAA Tournament's first weekend rocked.

No question about it.

We had buzzer beaters, we had close games ending at the same time, we had upsets, we had busted brackets. Bottom line, we had excitement.

Which is something that cannot be said about last year's first weekend.

But is it possible that an exciting first weekend was actually bad for the NCAA Tournament? One of the story lines I kept coming across is that while we were all sitting there, reveling in the excitement of a Northern Iowa win, a trip by Cornell to the Sweet 16, or another dominating performance from Omar Samhan, the NCAA was licking their lips. Interest in the NCAA Tournament equals higher ratings, and higher ratings in turn make the tourney a more valuable product.

In other words, an awesome tournament may have all but sealed tournament expansion.

Well, that's assuming that the ratings actually went up.

You see, this year, the NCAA tournament's first four days averaged a 5.3 Nielsen Rating. That is 0.1 less than last year.

That number is also misleading. 3.4 million hours of live video and audio were consumed during the tournament's first weekend on March Madness On Demand (MMOD). There are two reasons for that. The tournament's first day was as exciting as any day we have seen in tournament history in recent memory. It was also a Thursday, and the games started at noon on the east coast.

People were at work. They wanted to watch the games. They went online to do so. Those numbers will look good during the day any year that there are exciting games on during business hours.

But the other reason that the amount of games streamed online was so high was the terrible coverage the CBS provides. For the most part, everyone gets one CBS station. And if you live in a place like Kentucky, then the CBS station in your area is going to be showing the Wildcats play out all 40 minutes, regardless of what the final score is.

If you went online, however, you were able to watch any game that you wanted to. You would have had a chance to see the ending to both the Pitt-Xavier game and the Purdue-Texas A&M game.

If the tournament does end up expanding, the only thing that I ask is for ESPN to get the rights to air the games. Think about it -- you have ESPN, ESPN 2, ESPN U, ABC, ESPNNews, ESPNClassic, ESPN the Ocho. No network is better capable of airing four games at the same time than ESPN. If we get screwed with an expanded tournament, the least they can do is make every game available on TV.