Think March Madness Is Boring? Watch More Than the Highlights
(Bloomberg View) -- My wife and I went to our first and only basketball game of the season last Friday night. It was the Atlantic Coast Conference tournament semifinal between Clemson and the University of Virginia (my wife's alma mater), and it was played in Brooklyn. Beforehand, we both read Andy Staples' excellent Sports Illustrated cover story on top-ranked UVA's stifling defense. A sample:
Imagine drawing an arc on the court about 16 feet from the basket. (The three-point line is 20'9" out.) That is the Pack Line. When the ball is outside the line, the player guarding the ballhandler sprints to the perimeter, getting so close that he can guess what the guy ate for his pregame meal. The four other Cavaliers cluster inside the line, even if the players they are guarding are outside it. If, for example, the opposing point guard passes to a wing beyond the Pack Line, the defender on the point guard will drop within the line and the one guarding the wing will sprint out. If the ball is dumped inside, several Virginia players collapse on the recipient of the pass, often resulting in a turnover, a deflected pass or an ugly shot.
Sure enough, from our nosebleed seats high in Barclays Center, we could see these patterns develop before our eyes. Virginia fell behind 20-13 early in the game as Clemson players sank a few tough outside shots and Virginia players failed to, but the team and its coaches exuded no sense of urgency or panic. Another relevant quote from Staples' article:
“If they hit them, you just tip your hat,” sophomore guard Ty Jerome says. “Over time, teams that are going to have to take a tough shot with a hand in their face every possession, it’s going to wear on them.”
It did wear on Clemson, and UVA started making baskets. Within a few minutes, the score was 29-20 Virginia. The Cavaliers never trailed again.
So that was fun, given that we were rooting for Virginia. But just watching the Pack Line defense in action was fun, too. UVA has been criticized as the most boring team in college basketball, and I can testify that its game highlights on the ESPN app are generally not dazzling. Seeing the rough ballet of the Pack Line in action, though, and watching how it wore down the opponents, was actually thrilling.
Eugene Wei, a tech/media executive (most recently head of video at Facebook's Oculus virtual reality unit) with a wonderful blog, wrote in January that televised sports face big challenges in an age of rising competition from other forms of entertainment because sports narratives are so "brittle." His explanation:
Can you enjoy something just as much by just watching a tiny fraction of the best moments? If so, the narrative is brittle. If you can watch just the last scene of a movie and get most or all the pleasure of watching the whole thing, the narrative didn't earn your company for the journey.
Much more of sports fails this second test than many sports fans realize. I can watch highlights of most games on ESPN or HouseofHighlights on Instagram and extract most of the entertainment marrow and cultural capital of knowing what happened without having to sit through three hours of mostly commercials and dead time. That a game can be unbundled so easily into individual plays and retain most of its value to me might be seen as a good thing in the age of social media, but it's not ideal for the sports leagues if those excerpts are mostly viewed outside paywalls.
Given that live televised sports seem to be the main thing keeping the crumbling but still massively profitable edifice of cable television in the U.S. from collapsing, this is a development of importance to more than just sports leagues. One response, epitomized by the National Football League, is to tightly restrict the use and spread of game highlights, but do this and you risk "hemorrhaging cultural share," as Wei puts it. Let the highlights take on lives of their own, as the National Basketball Association does, and you keep the cultural share but risk losing your paying viewers. So far the NBA approach seems to be working better, with its TV ratings rising while the NFL's fall, although it's starting from a much lower base.
One reason might be that the freedom to make and distribute one's own NBA highlights allows people to do things like this:
This video explainer of how LeBron James successfully switched around Cleveland's offense after a failed trip down the court against Golden State in last year's NBA Finals is the work of Ben Falk, a 29-year-old former Philadelphia 76ers and Portland Trail Blazers executive (he started at Portland while he was still in college) who last year launched a basketball site called Cleaning the Glass. In yet another excellent Sports Illustrated story, a profile of Falk, Chris Ballard describes its uniqueness:
Here, without bells and whistles, is an efficient way to explain a relatively advanced, if not unique, skill. It’s the type of example that only someone versed in the game could recognize, only someone adept at programming could illustrate, and only someone who watches a ton of video would come across in the first place.
As with my experience in reading about and then watching UVA's Pack Line, it is also a reminder that there are narratives to sports events that go deeper than what can be plausibly condensed into standard highlight reels, and that casual viewers can be taught to appreciate them. I really am not much of a basketball fan, but Falk's explainer makes me want to observe James in action over extended periods to see if I can detect other such episodes of quiet brilliance. I probably won't; I've got way too many other things going on to add regular watching of the Cleveland Cavaliers to my schedule. But I am at least thinking about it.
In soccer, the sport I watch most on TV except in years when the Oakland A's are good, the highlight moments are so rare that you really can't appreciate the games unless you have some understanding (mine is admittedly pretty rudimentary and inarticulate) of the dramas playing out on the field between the scores and near-misses. In other sports, there have always been a few announcers who capably weave these background narratives into their work. I know Tim McCarver was driving most viewers crazy by the time he retired from calling baseball games in 2013, but I can remember him adding layer after layer to the game-watching experience in earlier years. From what I hear (I really don't watch much football), former Cowboys quarterback Tony Romo did that in his first go-round as an NFL analyst for CBS last season.
Right now, basketball seems to be generating the most such explanation, though. Maybe that's just because it's basketball season! But I also think there's a happy convergence of the sport's usually-in-motion nature; the emergence of a group of expert, articulate superfans that probably began with the rise of Bill Simmons; the NBA's willingness to accommodate superfans who know how to splice video; and the presence of stars who are not only very smart about the game (I imagine most basketball stars have always been that) but also willing and able to explain how it's played with startling clarity (a friend pointed me to Simmons's series of interviews with the Warriors' Kevin Durant, and what I've heard so far is pretty amazing). If sports are in fact in a battle with narrative brittleness, this is how you fight it.
This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.
Justin Fox is a Bloomberg View columnist. He was the editorial director of Harvard Business Review and wrote for Time, Fortune and American Banker. He is the author of “The Myth of the Rational Market.”
To contact the author of this story: Justin Fox at justinfox@bloomberg.net.
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