Hellacious Hype Makes March Maddening

As much as abundant hype during the two weeks before the Super Bowl engage and entertain me, the four days between the announcement of the field for the NCAA Tournament on Sunday and the first-round games on Thursday bore me to tears.

Let's play the games already!

Especially as this final week of conference tournaments winds down, when games usually mean nothing more than who falls where on the seed lines for the Big Dance, it's just time to play some meaningful basketball.

But, all the sports outlets -- CBS Sports, ESPN, every big and small talk radio show from coast, and anything and everything else -- will gladly play along. That's what makes March Madness so maddening.

Credit ESPN as the worst offender, with 89 hours (according to their creative accounting) part of the "Tournament Countdown" on ESPNU. That's right, between 7 p.m. Sunday and noon Thursday, they've labeld everything on ESPNU as programming leading up to the start of the tournament. That includes "The Herd with Colin Cowherd," which is simulcast with EPSN Radio. Will he really focus the entire show, every day, on college basketball? Let's hope not.

But, that's the power of the bracket, because even your grandma know about the bracket and advertisers and media outlets love to tie into that approach. Already this year SportsIllustrated.com and Lite Beer have conducted an online bracket for the best swimsuit model photos of all time.

On the heels of the highest-rated season of college basketball ever on ESPN (an average of 1.3 million viewers for 131 games, up 8 percent), it's also the power of college basketball itself.

In the hours after pairings are announced Sunday, almost every sports-related site on the Internet will boast some sort of bracket competition, allowing participants (most for free simply because the event drives so much traffic) to fill out brackets and compete for prizes.

It really is a powerful product -- and that power is in large part the reason the NCAA might sever its TV deal with CBS Sports after this year and look for more money (even though the remaining three years on the deal guarantee $2.1 billion). Still, it's also really an annoying product, because it produces so many byproducts.

With 65 teams (at least until somebody loses Tuesday), you'd think all those potential storylines would be appealing. They're not, though. Only a few teams in the tournament really have a chance and the abundance of hype, talk and what-ifs just make for an unbearable wait from the time we know the field until the the first game tips off.