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Will the N.C.A.A. Tournament Bracket Be Leaked Again? CBS Hopes Not

Seth Davis on CBS’s “Selection Sunday” last year.Credit...CBS

The anonymous Twitter poster who leaked last year’s N.C.A.A. men’s basketball tournament pairings halfway through CBS’s televised selection show is on the minds of a lot of people this weekend.

CBS Sports and Turner — broadcast partners whose deal for the tournament is worth nearly $20 billion through 2032 — remember the episode well, even if they still do not know how the Twitter user, who at the time occupied the handle @RICHIE, got his or her hands on the complete bracket.

And the N.C.A.A. said in a statement last month that it had “taken additional measures that we believe will prevent any premature release of information from reoccurring.”

“This includes,” the organization said, “reducing the number of entities and people who receive the bracket in advance.”

One upside of the incident? It has sparked changes to this year’s selection show.

CBS is shortening the program — which for many years lasted only a half-hour — to 90 minutes from two hours, and it will be frontloading the revealing of the bracket. A “vast majority” of the bracket will be released in the first 30 minutes, Sean McManus, chairman of CBS Sports, said last week. Most supplementary analysis and interviews will take place only after the bracket is revealed, according to David Levy, Turner’s president.

Levy acknowledged that the changes were not exclusively a response to the leak; they are also a reaction to the substantial outrage that last year’s drawn-out program engendered.

“I think we underestimated the viewers’ impatience,” he said last week.

That might have been why many fans embraced the leak, even if those affected most directly were not sure what to make of it.

Seth Davis, a college basketball analyst for CBS and Sports Illustrated, was on the air when it happened, focusing on the task at hand — analyzing the bracket as teams were revealed — and trying to make sure he did not inadvertently commit a similar spoiler.

“I’m always petrified about revealing something,” Davis said. “Like, if Syracuse comes up: ‘Oh, I can’t believe Syracuse got in and Rhode Island didn’t!’”

Tyler Roberson, then a junior at Syracuse, which was not assured a place in the field, said he was glued to the television when @RICHIE posted the entire bracket on Twitter. The leaked bracket showed the Orange with the Midwest’s No. 10 seed, but CBS — only halfway through the selections — had not yet revealed that quadrant.

“I didn’t know if it was true or not,” Roberson said. As CBS started to fill in the remainder of the bracket and the leaked version continued to match CBS’s, Roberson said, “we just got more and more confident about it.”

Syracuse wound up riding its 10th seed all the way to the Final Four.

Preventing the bracket’s leak can seem trivial, not only in an era of ubiquitous social media and self-publishing but also because CBS plans to release the full bracket not long after it is completed. But according to Neal Pilson, it matters a great deal to the rights holders. A former CBS Sports president, Pilson was the primary negotiator when his network pried the tournament’s broadcast rights from NBC in the early 1980s. The first live selection show aired on CBS in 1982.

“In terms of its allocation on rights fees, it’s obviously very small,” Pilson said. “But it’s still an extremely important part of how we present the tournament.”

He added, “Our theory was that the tournament is like a movie: It has a beginning, a middle and an end.”

The revealing of the field, then, is the dynamic action-movie opening that sucks you in for the rest of the ride — assuming it is pulled off without a hitch.

The CBS sportscaster Jim Nantz, who hosted the selection show for many years and now broadcasts segments on it after he is finished calling the Big Ten tournament, agreed.

“I always thought it was the coolest thing to be involved in,” he said last week, “because as a college basketball junkie, I couldn’t wait to look at the pairings, see where people were being sent.”

Asked whether anything remotely like last year’s leak had happened before, Nantz paused a moment and replied, “Yes.”

In 2005 or 2007 (key principals could not recall the precise year), and while Nantz and his broadcast partner Billy Packer were wrapping up their work on the Big Ten tournament at Chicago’s United Center, sheets of paper with the brackets were passed to them in advance of the selection show telecast. Nantz and Packer peeked, and casually discussed some of the matchups.

But as they stalled for the start of the show, and the bracket’s official unveiling, a man hovered nearby, listening and scribbling notes on a pad, according to Pat McGrath, Nantz’s longtime statistician.

In the production truck, the CBS director Bob Fishman, watching the feed of Nantz and Packer, noticed the man and then saw him slip out of the shot. McGrath was dispatched to chase him; he caught up to the man near the court’s exit and confronted him.

“What’ve you got there?” McGrath asked.

“I got nothing,” the man replied, according to McGrath.

But McGrath persisted, demanding, “Let me see it!” and tearing the top sheet off the man’s notebook. It contained the No. 1 seeds and a few key pairings. The crisis was averted, but those involved did not forget it.

“To the general public — do you care where you’re getting your brackets first?” Nantz asked rhetorically. “But for us, CBS and Turner, we’re paying a lot of money.”

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section SP, Page 5 of the New York edition with the headline: N.C.A.A. and CBS Take Steps to Prevent Another Bracket Leak. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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