On Sunday afternoon, CBS was set to televise the unveiling the 2016 NCAA tournament bracket. CBS has always hosted the bracket reveal, but this year was different. What was once just a thirty-minute program, this year was schedule for two full hours.
As expected, the show dragged on and on. With the matchups slowly being revealed, Charles Barkley and other analysts painfully struggled to break down the games with a touch screen. The show was a disaster. Luckily, that is where the internet came in to save the day. About 50 minutes into the program, a bracket leaked online. Within minutes, the bracket spread like wildfire on Twitter. While most users were unsure if the bracket was legitimate, as more and more teams were revealed on the broadcast it became clear that it was the real bracket. Social media users rejoiced as nobody had to sit through another excruciating hour of CBS' coverage.
While the NCAA and CBS wanted to milk the bracket reveal for as much TV revenue as possible, no college basketball fans were interested in sitting for two hours just to learn the bracket. That is why it was awesome to see the Internet stick it to the greedy NCAA and their TV partners on Sunday. It was almost like a victory for the "little guy." The arrogance and conceit of CBS and the NCAA came back to haunt them, for once.
Hopefully CBS and the NCAA learn from this past Sunday. I'd imagine that next year, CBS will go back to just a one hour program. But for this past weekend, the internet got the chance to to sabotage them, and they did.
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