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DIRECTV CLASSIC MEDIA CONFERENCENovember 13, 2012Arnie SgalioQ. Can you give us a little insight into the ESPN strategy in doing these events that bring together some of the top collegiate basketball teams each year? ARNIE SGALIO: First of all we want to have outstanding events for the student athletes. Obviously it provides a great amount of programming for us and we have events in Anaheim and southern California and Hawai'i and Puerto Rico and Walt Disney World. Certainly the venues are attractive to teams and the experience for this student athletes and the staffs and families are very important to us as well, and also the programming that it provides. We have a lot of quality teams at all levels and so it's been an outstanding run for us and we hope to continue it; and the teams that we work with, they continue to come back to us and want to attend the events. So hopefully we'll be doing this for quite a while. Q. We get questions periodically on how the first‑round pairings are made. Can you give an insight into how you work on developing the first round pairings and the bracketing for the in‑season tournament? ARNIE SGALIO: I think you try to look at sometimes things geographically on what makes sense; when you put the pairings together, there are obviously some considerations for television, as well as we look at some things. Certainly, it takes no exact science and we'll sit down and talk about the fields and what match‑ups we think will be really good. There's no really exact way or formula that we have. We try to get the best match‑ups out there and certainly any team is capable of winning the event. We'll go from there and hopefully provide some outstanding match‑ups for people to view at the arena and view on ESPN. Q. Discuss the broadcasting talent for the tournament, we have Dave Fleming and Sean Farnham working the night games and Roxy Bernstein and Steve Bardo (ph) doing the afternoon games. So kind of talk about the announce groups. ARNIE SGALIO: Very outstanding talent teams. We are very fortunate to have them with us in Anaheim. Obviously people that no college basketball real well and live it, and certainly we have some West Coast influence there with Dave and Sean, and Steven bar know is an outstanding color analyst, as well. So we are very blessed to have outstanding talent during the games, and we are looking forward to having them there. So I'm sure they will give people a lot of insight into the talented teams that we have. Q. Of all the tournaments we had, 2009was probably our best where we had two teams advance to the Final Four. ARNIE SGALIO: Yeah, that was one of the great events we have had in Anaheim; to look back on that and see that two Final Four teams merged from that field, and I think Butler actually lost two of the three games they played in the event, as I recall. I think that may be right. They went on an incredible run to get to the Final Four. And certainly you well know, too, you can update our folks on the call, the quality of the players that we have had come through at the Anaheim event‑‑ a lot of people in the NBA now that people would recognize. Q. We had three teams advance to the NCAA last year, and so forth; does that factor into when you select teams for the tournament for the coming years or how do you go about selecting teams? ARNIE SGALIO: It really depends. What we try do is we try to get teams involved over the course of time for all our events. Certainly we would love team‑‑ in the events that we have. As you know, we are two events this week in Puerto Rico and in Charleston, South Carolina, and then over the Thanksgiving week, we have Anaheim and the event at Walt Disney World. So teams, we look at all kinds of things, but many of these schedules and teams that we bring in are determined well ahead of time, sometimes three or four years out. So certainly it is a factor but it's hard to know sometimes what teams will be good at certain times. A lot of times it's catch as can and do the best you can with making the fields competitive. One thing I wanted to say, this event can't be put on each year without the assistance and the guidance of our friends at the Big West, Dennis Farrell, the commissioner and Rob Halvaks, the deputy commissioner, they provide such great service to helping us host and providing what we need to put on a quality tournament. So our hat is off to Dennis and Rob and their entire staff and all of the people that are involved that they put together. Q. When do you think the announcement for 2013 might come out? ARNIE SGALIO: Hopefully the next few weeks. The field for 2013 is really outstanding. We have some good area teams that will be involved and that's really all I can get into right now. You know, very strong field again, so we'll look for that and we are going to want to attend the event next year. Q. Can you talk about the format where we play two games, one on Thanksgiving, Friday, off Saturday, and Sunday, and the advantages of playing it that way? ARNIE SGALIO: One of the things of a multi‑team event, teams play three games at these events and the way we have it structured is to play games on Thursday, Friday and take a day off and then play on Sunday. So what we found is that teams really like the format because you play a doubleheader, you get one day that kind of allows you to recoup and play a third day. I think what it does especially early in the season, and most coaches will tell you, that they can kind of see where their teams are at for the early season exercise and to see how they need to prepare for the rest of the year and I think it may give teams looks for upcoming tournaments, be it their conference tournaments or even the NCAA Tournament or any postseason they might play later in the year. So we have had good comments from the coaches involved with the way we do the format. Some tournaments play three straight days, but our multi‑team event tournaments, we play two days, take a day off and play the third day. It seems to have worked pretty well. A lot of basketball, but again, early season, it kind of measures a team to see where they are at. FastScripts Transcript by ASAP Sports |
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