The CBS announcing team professionalism and both play-by-play and color commentary far exceed anything the “Entertainment” network throws at us. Really enjoy watching and listening to these games.
Kudos to Awful Announcing for putting together a compilation of calls of Lamont Butler's shot so soon after the SDU win over FAU. They've got the CBS broadcast, local San Diego sports radio, ESPN International, and Westwood One.
It's worth a click. Thanks to some embedded tweets, you can watch or hear them. Or read them -- each call is transcribed. Jim Nantz was a bit slow on the "Butler did it" line, not having it ready right after the shot, but said some interesting things beforehand. Dick Vitale was covering the game for ESPN International, and was highly subdued, for him.
I’m not a Nantz fan, either, and welcome his retirement and replacement by Eagle. I wouldn’t object to Raftery getting one more year, but that’s it. Grant Hill gets better, though I don’t prefer him to Spanarkel. I’ll hope that by the 2025 NCAAT (at the latest) Eagle’s partner is Spanarkel or Hill, with just maybe Jay Wright as 3d guy.
I hope Jim Spanarkel gets the color job, sooner rather
than later! He’s the best in the biz- always focused on the game and very insightful. And maybe it’ll boost my decades long campaign to hang # 34 in the rafters!
With the tournament completed, I thought I would follow up on this.
Awful Announcing: The 2023 NCAA Tournament broadcaster rankings
By popular vote, each team was given a letter grade for their job during the first weekend of the tournament. (You can see the sites and games they worked in the quoted post above.) Just like in school, the letter grades are then converted to numbers on a 0 to 4 point scale and then averaged, so think of each number below as a grade point average.
I'm just going to list the rankings; click over to see a further breakdown (most commonly assigned letter grade by vote percentage, past performances, and commentary).
8. Lisa Byington, Avery Johnson, and Steve Smith – 1.93
7. Spero Dedes and Deb Antonelli – 2.25
6. Brad Nessler and Brendan Haywood – 2.75
5. Andrew Catalon and Steve Lappas – 3.00
4. Brian Anderson and Jim Jackson – 3.10
3. Jim Nantz, Grant Hill, and Bill Raftery – 3.36
2. Kevin Harlan, Dan Bonner, and Stan Van Gundy – 3.64
1. Ian Eagle and Jim Spanarkel – 3.73
You can also check previous years. 2021 is noteworthy because it was the year that Jim Spanarkel missed the first weekend due to COVID protocols and Grant Hill filled in. The Eagle/Hill pairing was a revelation and the #1 ranked team that year:
"Broken out of the trio he was in with Nantz and Raftery, Hill was able to shine in the first two rounds before being moved back into his long-time booth this week. Eagle’s NCAA Tournament broadcast teams prior to his partnership with Spanarkel show that he doesn’t have that kind of chemistry with everyone, but in Hill, he may have found a partner that is a more than adequate stand-in."
This bodes well for the future. We know that Ian Eagle is taking over for the retired Jim Nantz. While nothing more has been publicly decided, I doubt CBS will make further changes to the A-Team: it will probably be Eagle/Raftery/Hill next year. As for the trickle down, CBS will probably do the bare minimum here. After their call on the FDU-Purdue upset, Andrew Catalon and Steve Lappas became overnight successes, years in the making. I expect both to team up with Spanarkel to be the new fourth team, one that gets to keep announcing in the second weekend. Then CBS has to put together a new eighth team, but they can just promote from within, given all the studio, radio, and website people on their payroll.