Going into this weekend, the NCAA Men's College Basketball Tournament has been officially trimmed to four fantastic teams, and this year's CBS March Madness television coverage has once again frustrated the lucid, logical thinking of reasonably intelligent college basketball fans everywhere.
Big Dance diehards have fallen fast for the foolish fodder and boyish banter beaming from the CBS broadcast booth without ever questioning the corny, cliche cloaked commentary and overt omissions of CBS' celebrated basketball announcers.
At times, CBS ignores the blatantly obvious right at the tip of your nose stuff, while hypnotically hounding fans with hokey, hyperbolic play-by-play analysis, subtly sucking viewers brains right out of their cranial cavities.
So, college basketball fans, put the Panasonic plasma on pause and ponder these missing March Madness oversights, compliments of CBS' college basketball announcers.
Here are my first 4 forgettable picks:
#1. The Missed Free Throw Party - OK, so why can't we find anyone in the CBS broadcast booth with some bravado to decry the dubiously dreadful display of celebrating shooting ineptitude nearly every time a free throw shooter misses a gimme from the charity stripe?
Doesn't anybody else on the planet find it utterly ridiculous when teammates enthusiastically approach the brick-laying free throw shooter and congratulate him with high fives and pats to the butt after he just clanged an important freebie from 15 feet? Imagine if MLB infielders raced to the pitcher's mound to bask in the embarrassment of a pitcher who's last fast ball wound up 450' away as some fan's souvenir in the center field's stands!
CBS' silence on the Missed Free Throw Party makes no sense whatsoever to me.
#2. Tattoos - Once again, why doesn't someone in the CBS broadcast booth blurt out the obvious and bemoan the proliferation of butt-ugly tattoos blanketing far too much of the basketball players' exposed skin? After witnessing Northern Iowa's upset of Kansas, I'm all for lobbying for an NCAA ban barring big, beefy boys without a tan from ever sporting multi-colored tattoos on any part of their bodies.
My second petition will be for the NCAA to mandate long-sleeved, turtle necked shirts to cover any future fashion paux of all heavily inked players because it seems like inebriated frat house friends frolicked with Etch-a-Sketch art on the chiseled players' forearms, biceps, backs, necks and shoulders!
Perhaps CBS should initiate a think before you ink campaign to spare viewers at home from witnessing these unsightly tattoos.
#3. College Basketball's Teflon Coated Coach - OK, why aren't college basketball conspiratorial crazies feasting on the journalistic blackout concerning Kentucky coach John Calipari? Never heard a peep from any of the boys in the CBS broadcast booth scrutinizing this slippery and unscrupulous coaching cad from Lexington. College basketball's highest paid coach is historically a walking NCAA infraction-in-the-making with a well-chronicled resume of recruiting players with no regard for collegiate consistency, scholarship and integrity within their university's basketball program.
Perhaps the CBS boys believe Kentucky actually recruited Coach Calipari to improve its anemic 9% graduation rate or that the muck that Just in Time Johnny (getting out of the place before your sordid history catches up with you) left at Memphis and Massachusetts was merely coincidental. Duh!
#4 - There's a Lid on the Basket - Doesn't anyone else agree that this is one of the most over used cliches in sports? CBS sportscasters need to remove from their repertoire this ritualistic excuse for poor shooting. Come on, CBS, give the opposing team's defense better credit and mute any mention of this trite expression citing a metaphorical metal disk hermetically soldered to a rim. There isn't anything physical attached to the rim prohibiting the ball from going into the basket.
The only things preventing better shooting are better shooters or even better defense from the opposition..... and it doesn't require a handsomely paid former player wearing a thousand dollar suit sitting in a broadcast booth to figure it out.
Maybe CBS should put lids on the lips of some of their basketball broadcasting boys in the booth before they blurt out any more corny cliches or totally overlook the obvious.
OK, college basketball fans, email me your selections of slack CBS sports casting and blatanly obvious omissions from this year's NCAA Men's Basketball Tournament.
Straight talk. No static.
MIKE - thee American made voice on sports!
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