Interview With Seth Davis

Seth Davis has worked since 1995 at Sports Illustrated, for which he writes the “Inside College Basketball” column. He is also a studio analyst for CBS television’s coverage of' NCAA men's college basketball. Davis is the author of "When March Went Mad." The book tells the story of the 1979 college basketball season and the championship game between Magic Johnson’s Michigan State and Larry Bird’s Indiana State teams that helped transform the sport and led to the expansion of the tournament and how it would be televised and covered. I spoke recently with Seth.

Q. The last time we spoke, you had just written “When March Went Mad.” Any new projects in the works?

Davis: I am writing a biography of John Wooden. It’s by the same publisher [Times Books], but probably won’t be out for another two years, so don’t look for it too hard just yet. It’s a great, and very challenging, project.

Q. In “When March Went Mad,” you wrote about the significance of the 1979 NCAA basketball championship game. What was so memorable about that game?

Davis: It was a moment in time. The game itself wasn’t that great. Obviously there were two great players in Magic Johnson and Larry Bird, but it happened at the dawn of a brand-new era, with the explosion of cable television and, specifically, ESPN. And it came at a time when the NCAA tournament was getting ready to explode. It expanded three times between 1979 and 1985. And the NBA was at a pretty low point, ready and desperate for this injection of these two guys. So, it was all laid out. Magic and Bird came along at the exact time. My book tried to tell the story of how it all came about and how all these forces converged to produce this moment.

Q. The NBA title game was on tape delay at the time.

Davis: When Magic was a rookie, it was one of the great games of all time. He substituted for Kareem [Abdul-Jabbar] as the center and the Lakers beat the Sixers.

Q. Some rules changes for the college game also came about after that: the shot clock and the three-point shot.

Davis: It was all part and parcel of the explosion of television. The more people were seeing the game, the more it had to be a television-friendly product. From college basketball’s perspective, it was really the expansion of the tournament that helped accelerate it. In 1982 they went back to a dome in New Orleans. That’s where Michael Jordan hit the [game-winning] shot for North Carolina. I think 1996 was the last time it [the Final Four] was in a regular arena. They went back and forth a little bit to arenas, but [the 1979 title game] came along at the perfect time.

Q. Now the tournament is about to expand again this season. How do you feel about that?

Davis: I was very relieved that [the committee] didn’t go to 96 [teams], like they were talking about. And I was never convinced that that was a done deal, like so many people were reporting. I just felt like the NCAA was doing its due diligence, trying to figure out if the Benjamins would be that much different at 96 as opposed to 65, where it was, or the middle option, which is what they settled on with 68 teams. I think it’s probably a good thing. I think it’s going to create a nice day.

Q. Explain.

Davis: That Tuesday, you’re going to have four games, as opposed to the opening-round, or play-in, game that nobody watched or paid any attention to. The quadruple-header on TV is going to be at least more compelling than it was before. I’m glad for the NCAA at a time when it’s a huge challenge to the media business, not to mention the global economy. I think it ended up being a 61 percent rights increase. That’s pretty doggone impressive. I’m happy for them because it’s good for college sports. Most of all I’m happy for me because [the tournament] stayed on CBS.

Q. What does the new partnership between CBS and Turner mean for the NCAA basketball tournament?

Davis: There’s a lot to figure out. There are two separate companies converging, and not even to become one company but just to be partners on a single event. It’s pretty unprecedented as far as the scope on this level. The Super Bowl goes to different networks, but they don’t work together to produce any one game. It will be interesting. You’re going to have a lot of voices from TNT. It’s great for the tournament to have Charles Barkley talking about it. Everyone wants to know what he has to say. It’s good to have a quality company like Turner in the game. We now have another powerful media organization that has a stake in the success of college basketball. It’s great for the sport.

Q. And it means that some fresh voices, including Marv Albert, among others on the NBA beat, will be doing some college games.

Davis: Marv Albert and maybe Steve Kerr. I don’t know who else they’re talking about. I’ll have some more opportunities to work. It’s all about finding some work.

Q. And getting paid for it.

Davis: Once in a while, yeah!

Q. As far as the tournament, and the game itself, do we need any more changes?

Davis: You can always tweak the rules here and there. One of my arguments against expansion was, “Hey, this thing ain’t broke. Let’s not try to fix it.” I think going to 96 teams would have drastically altered not just the tournament but the whole dynamic of the sport. It’s enough of a challenge for college basketball to get anybody’s attention during the regular season if you’re not a hardcore fan.

Q. There’s a lot of competition for the viewers’ attention.

Davis: First of all, there’s football and the NBA and college football and so much going on over the winter. At least when you get to February, you have a lot of very significant games that have an impact on who gets to the NCAA tournament. If you went to 96 [teams], I think you would hurt March, but you would really hurt February. So, I’m glad that cooler heads prevailed there.

Q. What are the best and worst developments in the game since 1979?

Davis: Clearly the worst development is the prevalence of agents. You’re seeing a lot of it in football, but in a lot of ways I think it’s worse in basketball. Football does not have the grassroots netherworld that you have in basketball. In football, when an agent makes an improper contact with an athlete, [the athlete] is already in college. In basketball, when an agent—maybe it’s not even improper—first gets his clutches in a player, he might be 12 years old, literally. It filters down to the AAU and the grassroots and it’s just a cruddy world.   

Q. Anything else?

Davis: In concert with that are the early defections to the pros that really hurt college basketball. Maybe not as much as people say or have anticipated, but that’s the other thing that comes to mind.

Q. What about the best developments?

Davis: On the positive side, along the lines of that ’79 game is just the exposure that college basketball gets. It really is a very television-friendly sport. It fits in a nice, neat two-hour window. It’s a great spectator sport. It’s on seven days a week if you want to find it. Whether it’s the Mountain Network or the Big Ten Network or CBS College Sports or ESPNU or Fox Sports Net, everybody is trying to find something to broadcast, and I think it’s fun for the kids and it’s great for the fans.

Q. Before the expansion of the game and its coverage, there was Eddie Einhorn, who produced many of the games on TV back in the seventies.

Davis: Eddie was the original visionary. He was the guy who put together the UCLA/Houston game in the Astrodome, the first regular-season nationally televised college basketball game. It just required a few visionary guys to be in the right place at the right time to enact their vision. And we all—not just in sports—benefit when guys like that come along.

Q. Back then, there was no ESPN and no drumbeats for incoming freshmen, let alone for the top seventh-graders in the country.

Davis: It is kind of a double-edged sword. You lose that mystique. You lose that mystery. We know so much about these kids now. You have Roy Williams complaining about the media pressure on Harrison Barnes. The guy’s played six games! It’s too much too soon, and I’m certainly part of the problem.

Q. The media pressure hadn’t seemed to bother Kyrie Irving too much before he was injured.

Davis: Everybody handles it differently. And I would remind Roy Williams that Harrison Barnes was the guy who staged a press conference on national television as a high school senior and notified the world where he was going to college by dialing up Roy Williams on Skype. He played the game pretty deftly, I would say, to build up hype and attention on himself. [Williams] is protecting his guy and Harrison Barnes isn’t complaining about anything, but you’ve got to be careful. It’s like the saying about dancing with the bear. You can dance with the bear, but then the bear decides when to stop dancing. Be careful what bear you dance with.

Q. Does the one-and-done player affect recruiting? Are there coaches who are reluctant to recruit a player who will be in school for just one year?

Davis: I think you’re more likely to recruit someone who’s going to be there for one year because that means he’s really good. You want guys who are really good (laughing). Kyrie Irving, I doubt very much, is going to be at Duke for more than one year. But, believe me, they’re happy to have him. It’s just reality. You either recruit these guys or you lose to the guy who recruited them. And a lot of times, guys think that they’re one-and-done, and they’re not even good college players.

Q. For example?

Davis: You’ve got a player right now at Syracuse, a freshman named Fab Melo. He grew up in Brazil. If there was a no [NBA] age minimum—he’s a seven-footer who can run and jump and is really talente—he certainly would have been a first-rounder and maybe even a lottery pick. And he’s barely getting off the bench at Syracuse because he doesn’t know how to play. A lot of times these guys get to college—and they all think that they’re one-and-done—but the rubber hits the road once they actually get there.

Q. Can anybody beat Duke, the consensus No. 1, this season?

Davis: I would really doubt that Duke is going to go undefeated. There’s a reason why no one has done it since 1976. The one thing that gives me some pause is that the ACC is pretty bad. Right now, Duke is the only team in the ACC ranked in the top 25. So, it’s very hard to look at their schedule and say they’re going to lose this game and they’re going to lose that game. They got by Kansas State and Michigan State, and those were the two toughest roadblocks. And [now] it’s a lot of home cookin’. But these are not robots. At some point, they are going to get out there once or twice and they’re just going to look horrible. They’re college kids.

Q. What’s the best-kept secret in college basketball this year?

Davis: Man, I feel like there are no secrets. There’s a guy who plays at San Diego State named Kawhi Leonard. He’s a sophomore, a solid scorer/rebounder in the post and probably a first-round pick. But to those who follow the game he’s not really much of a secret, I guess.

Q. Tell me something about the NCAA tournament that would surprise most fans.

Davis: It’s a hard question to answer. We always think about the NCAA tournament as this forum for upsets, but if you look at the teams that win the thing, I think 75 percent or 80 percent of the time it’s a No. 1 seed or a No. 2 seed. People thought that Duke was a surprise winning it last season, but they were a No. 1 seed. The best team usually does win.

Q. What’s your most memorable personal shining moment?

Davis: I was a senior at Duke when Christian Laettner hit that shot against Kentucky. He was my classmate and a couple of guys on that team were my fraternity brothers. Twenty years later, it may have been cool to say I was at that game. But the truth is, it was a lot more fun to be on campus when that happened.

Q. You quoted coach Pat Summit in your book: “The most successful organizations are those that are always looking for the new idea, the new way of doing things—or at least improving upon what they know.”  Who does that better than anybody? What’s the best new idea in college basketball?

Davis: I have to go to the man at the top, and that’s [the NCAA’s] Greg Shaheen. What he did with this television contract, bringing the partnership between CBS and Turner, dealing with Myles Brand being sick and the changing of the guard, and dealing with the economic and media environment…Greg is a hard worker and very forward thinking. I think the NCAA is very lucky in that regard.

Q. I once asked him if he would trade his job for any other, and he said he wanted to be Director of Homeland Security.

Davis: (laughing) That’s actually less challenging than running the NCAA basketball tournament.

Q. John King of CNN told me that he would trade jobs with Jason Varitek. What about you?

Davis: It sounds weird to say this, but the job that I have is so much better than what I ever aspired to. Ah…I’ll take Springsteen. I think it would be cool to be a rock star. There’s got to be nothing cooler than going on stage and having 50,000 people scream at you and just be excited to hear your music. That’s got to be a pretty nice feeling.

Q. What are you reading these days?

Davis: I’m reading Keith Richards’ memoir [“Life”] but moving very slowly because it’s basketball season. I just finished “Death to the BCS,” which I thought was excellent. Before that I read Bob Woodward’s book “Obama’s War.” And I really want to read David Maraniss’ biography of Vince Lombardi [“When Pride Still Mattered”] because that is considered the benchmark of sports biographies, and I’m writing a sports biography. I think I’d have a lot to learn from that.