Posted on Thu, Mar. 16, 2006
DREAM DAY
Opening round of March Madness offers wall-to-wall thrills
By BLAIR KERKHOFF
The Kansas City Star

Devotees of the NFL, major-league baseball and other professional sports D would take exception to calling today and Friday the best days of the American sports calendar.

Television ratings for other championships dwarf the opening days of the NCAA Tournament, they’d say. College basketball isn’t at the top of any of those favorite sports surveys, they’d insist.

They’d be right.

But the opening day of March Madness provides the rarest of pleasures — championship-level competition that begins in the light of a working weekday and continues until the bleary-eyed hours of early Friday.

Then, in a matter of hours, it begins anew. Sixteen more games on Friday, with teams touching every corner of the nation, public and private, stretching from obscene budgets to mere pittance purse strings by comparison.

And that makes today, the official Madness tipoff, arguably the greatest day in American sports.

These games aren’t material for water cooler conversation — they’re reason to avoid the water cooler all together.

“People are going to call in sick or dead,” said Jim Fager, gearing up for huge business days at Tanner’s Bar and Grill on 143rd Street in Overland Park.

The NCAA Tournament can drive a working stiff batty, especially if he or she has to baby-sit 11th-seeded Wisconsin-Milwaukee’s upset bid against sixth-seeded Oklahoma. The game tips off at 11:25 a.m. today, and it could mean life or death for your bracket.

Think about it. Other championship events are geared for prime-time viewing. Super Bowl, World Series games, the college football championship, NBA finals, Stanley Cup, Kentucky Derby, Indianapolis 500, all in the evening or on the weekend.

Early-round baseball playoffs join the NCAA Tournament as a weekday event. The difference is, nobody gets eliminated those first days. By 1:30 p.m. today, Wichita State or Seton Hall will be clearing out of a locker room for a final time this season and the winner’s dream will continue at least until Saturday.

It’s a throwback to when team sports happened in the sunshine hours. Youngsters have no idea about this, but World Series games weren’t played at night until 1972 (Game four, Pirates-Orioles. Ump took a home run away from Clemente, but he then singled. Bucs won, not that anyone would remember), more than three decades after the first lights went up around stadiums.

Lucky were students with teachers who believed World Series games were just as interesting as space launches. Just after recess, the black-and-white television set was rolled in, the lights were turned off and if you didn’t want to watch the Tigers and Cardinals, you could just put your head on the desk.

Work stopped. Games were celebrated.

That is what today and Friday are about. The moments that define the early rounds of the NCAA Tournament — the tense finishes, buzzer-beaters and upsets — can happen at 2 p.m.

By 4 p.m. your bracket can be in shambles, and 24 hours later you can be back in the game because of what happened in the contests that started before noon on Friday.

The NAIA tournament in Kansas City had it figured out long ago with opening-round and second-round games from the breakfast to the midnight snack hours. The NCAA went to afternoon games as the bracket expanded. It might not grab the television ratings of the weekend and evening games of the later rounds, but it’s part of the $6 billion rights fee CBS paid to the NCAA.

And the daytime drama gives the tournament its full flavor.

Not everyone is on board with this NCAA Tournament opening days as a holiday notion.

Forbes magazine reports the first two days of games will cost $3.8 billion in lost productivity, in large part because the games can be accessed online at no cost.

March Madness on demand streaming on your broadband-connected computer from the comfort of your cubicle. It’s the fourth year of the service but the first time it’s free. The deal is good for the first three rounds, through this weekend and the Sweet 16 games.

As one ad executive put it, it will combine three modern time-wasting pastimes: sports, surfing the Web and Internet gambling.

Today and Friday will be buzzing.

“Busiest days of the tournament until the Final Four,” said Kevin Smith, director of communications for BETonSPORTS, an online sports book.

Smith expects about $300 million to be wagered online, ranking the NCAA Tournament second to the Super Bowl as the most attractive event for Internet bettors. Other industry analysts say the figures for wagering on the monthlong tournament are higher.

Smith said his company sees many first-time or once-a-year gamblers, perhaps placing a wager on his midmajor alma mater.

“Schools that aren’t normally in the tournament, or have never been there, will get involved for a first time,” Smith said.

And they might be doing it at work, or following their office pool bracket, watching their favorite team or getting scoring updates, which means they’re not working.

Kansas State associate professor for management Diane Swanson doesn’t begrudge the worker on these days.

“I don’t question the seriousness of a productivity loss,” Swanson said. “But there is a changing contract between companies and employees, with downsizing and outsourcing and broken promises in pensions.

“This can be a good thing when employees want to come to work and share a common interest. It can create a bond among employees and increase their interest in work.”

Besides, according to labor surveys, American workers receive the least amount of vacation time, leave more vacation days on the table and are more likely to work more than 40 hours than any industrialized nation.

If a coat-and-tie wants to hit the sports bar for some Boston College-Pacific or Nevada-Montana today, it shouldn’t show up on the annual job performance review. To be sure it doesn’t, bring the boss along.

Get there early.

“We expect a monster day today and a double monster day on Friday,” said Fager at Tanner’s.

Ah, Friday. St. Patrick’s Day. More often than not it falls on an NCAA Tournament day, and when it hits on the Thursday or Friday, double monster.

Fager was running the Tanner’s in Lenexa a few years ago when the selection committee did Kansas City no favors by starting the Kansas and Missouri games within minutes of each other.

It also, as Fager recalled, was St. Patty’s Day.

“Largest business day in the 14 years of Tanner’s,” Fager said. “We’d just opened our North location (in Kansas City), it was zoo there, too.”

Fager’s been in the business long enough to know when to load up on the food and drinks.

Kansas City-area sports bars got some practice last week during the Big 12 tournament. Kansas State played on a Thursday afternoon. Missouri that night. Kansas the next night.

But these next two days will be different. It’s something of a perfect storm with the NCAA Tournament, the wearin o’ the green, and spring break for area college students.

“People will be in here with their brackets, looking for the upsets,” Fager said. “Everybody watches the upsets.”

Sometimes they happen before the work whistle blows. And your bracket is busted, and four other games are happening, and your alma mater plays tonight and you’re not going to work tomorrow and for sports fans, it gets no better than this.

To reach Blair Kerkhoff, college sports reporter for The Star, call (816) 234-4730 or send e-mail to bkerkhoff@kcstar.com