Warren Buffet's billion dollars is safe. In less than two days of the NCCA basketball tournament, everyone is already out of the billion dollar brackets. Everyone.
ESPN has their own $100,000 bracket going. Of the 11 million entries, only THREE people still have a perfect bracket going. The odds any of the three will make it to the end aren't very good either.
Ohio State losing in the first round sent 85% of the entrants home early the first day. It really didn't take many more losses to send every one home yesterday.
What I find MORE interesting? CBS ratings in prime time THIS year were way worse than last year. It seems that I was right all along. March Madness is a myth. People aren't interested in actually WATCHING the games, they are interested in BETTING on them.
Their interest only extends to their betting bracket. The games themselves don't matter much.
In prime time on Thursday night CBS usually features The Big Bang Theory, the most watched show on television. They frequently push the 20 million viewer mark. They end the night with Elementary, a show that garners more than 10 million viewers, still always winning its time lot.
Thursday night this week? LESS than 4.5 million viewers average for the entire night. CBS doesn't have a single show in their prime time lineup for the entire week that does anywhere near that poorly.
What's interesting is that every single rating on every other program on NBC and ABC went up Thursday night. Scandal on ABC broke the 10 million viewer mark for the first time ever. Community on NBC had it's best ratings in two years. People actually went out of their way to avoid the basketball games on CBS.
CBS is still going to have good ratings for their prime time lineup when it returns, but just like last year, other networks were given a boost thanks to CBS. And some people will not return now that they sampled the other shows. In short, the tournament is a ratings disaster for them. THE ONLY good ratings they get from the entire tournament is the National Championship Game itself.
Having that many unknown teams in the tournament does NOT add to the excitement. It detracts from it. The long regular season where wins don't matter doesn't help either. College basketball, even with a billion dollars at stake, has become a bore.
And it's only going to get worse. Sometimes less is more. March Malaise has set in and already nobody cares.
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