Posts Tagged ‘NCAA’

The 2011 NCAA Division I Men’s Basketball Championship is set to tip off Tuesday night, and while Google Earth may not be able to bring users 3D images from inside the arenas — CBS and its cable partners might be slightly miffed — the outside of the 14 tournament arenas is available via the virtual tour below.

Google also created a special tournament page enabling users to track the schedule, explore campuses via Street View, watch the actual games via NCAA March Madness on Demand, create brackets, read Google News coverage, and download apps from the Chrome Web Store.

CBSSports.com College Network teamed up with Thought Equity Motion to offer colleges and universities the ability to monetize their video sports libraries using the latter’s Hosted Video Management & Delivery Platform.

Its 175 or so member schools will be able to: digitize and preserve master, broadcast-quality assets in enterprise-class, geographically redundant storage facilities; search, preview, clip, and download games in multiple formats from any Web browser; use a Web-based portal to deliver content to partners, broadcasters, and other third parties in seconds; integrate more digital content into their websites; support rich-media experiences such as the NCAA Vault and the ACC Vault with content from their digital archives, including play-by-play metadata indexing, search, and social and sharing features; and license content via Thought Equity’s global sales force.

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National Signing Day, when high-school athletes declare their college destinations, is set for Wednesday, Feb. 2, and CBSSports.com and CBSSports.com College Network are ready to sign their letters of intent.

The CBSSports.com 2011 Signing Day site will offer continuous coverage up to and through National Signing Day, including braking news, video, and analysis by experts including Tom Lemming, MaxPreps.com national football editor Stephen Spiewak, CBSSports.com recruiting expert Bryan Fischer, and MaxPreps.com senior writer and columnist Mitch Stephens.

CBSSports.com will also rank the top college recruiting classes, provide a state-by-state breakdown of signed players, track major players who remain unsigned, and offer a match-up tool allowing users to do head-to-head comparison of any of the 2,500 players in the MaxPreps.com database.

The site also includes a player-commitment database with a dedicated page for every Division I recruit, as well as a page listing signings for each of the 120 FBS programs.

As for CBSSports.com College Network, its roster of more than 175 official athletic school sites will offer live streaming of press conferences, exclusive on-demand video content, features, and individual recruit highlight packages.

Select college-basketball games from the Big East, Big Ten, and Southeastern Conference will once again be live-streamed by CBSSports.com and CBS Sports Mobile, starting with the 2010-11 season debut of College Basketball Live Saturday, when South Carolina travels to No. 2 Ohio State at 2 p.m. ET.

More than 20 games will be streamed free-of-charge, and users will have access to a scoreboard feature with in-game statistics, scores from other games, standings, live chat, video previews, and on-demand highlights.

The CBS Sports Mobile iPhone app will also provide full NCAA Division I college basketball scoreboards, individual GameTrackers for top 25 matchups, polls, headlines, and standings.

CBSSports.com senior vice president and general manager Jason Kint said:

We’re thrilled to have a tremendous slate of live college basketball games on CBSSports.com. Over the course of 2010, CBSSports.com has streamed nearly 11,000 live sports events and press conferences, and we look forward to building on that in 2011.

The minor controversy in college football’s Bowl Championship Series ratings that resulted in Boise State being moved up to No. 10 and LSU being dropped to the No. 11 spot was the result of an error discovered by Jerry Palm of CBSSports.com.

Palm wrote:

The final BCS ratings show LSU ranked 10th and Boise State 11th. But I discovered a mistake that would switch the order of those teams. Boise State should be 10th in the overall BCS standings and LSU should be No. 11.

Wes Colley‘s final rankings, as submitted to the BCS, were incorrect. The Appalachian State-Western Illinois FCS playoff game was missing from his data set. I will spare you some of the gory, mathematical details, but the net result of that omission in Colley’s rankings is that LSU, which he ranked ninth, and his No. 10, Boise State, should be switched. Alabama and Nebraska, which he had 17th and 18th, would also be swapped.

Palm’s discovery led to a scathing email from Boise State president Bob Kustra, as reported by CBSSports.com:

How many times have we heard calls for transparency on our campuses, and how many times have we shared our governance and communicated with our faculties and other constituencies in transparent fashion?. Yet, in intercollegiate athletics, with the NCAA standing silently on the sidelines, we allow the BCS to work its magic with no idea of how accurate its rankings are on a week-to-week basis.

Turner Sports secured a substantial addition to its roster of sports-related Internet properties, reaching a 14-year deal with the NCAA to operate digital properties associated with its NCAA.com, reports Marcus Vanderberg of sister blog SportsNewser.

The NCAA joins NBA.com, WNBA.com, PGATOUR.com, and NASCAR.com under the Turner Sports umbrella.

The site will relaunch during the first quarter of 2011 with more original fare, enhanced selection shows, and live video for all 88 championship tournaments across 23 NCAA sports.

For more, please see SportsNewser.

Fans of Southeastern Conference football who aren’t near their television sets may be spending quite a bit of time on CBSSports.com or hunched over their iPhones, as the Web site will offer the SEC on CBS game of the week free-of-charge, and the broadcast network’s entire SEC schedule will be available via the CBS Sports Mobile iPhone app.

The SEC on CBS game of the week slate kicks off Saturday at 3:30 p.m. ET with the rivalry match-up of Florida at Tennessee. The live game feeds on CBSSports.com will offer a scoreboard feature with in-game statistics, as well as scores and standings from throughout the NCAA, along with live chat, video previews, and breaking news from reporters’ Twitter accounts.

The iPhone app will also provide full scoreboards, polls, headlines, standings, and individual GameTrackers for games involving teams ranked in the top 25.