March Madness Needs To Do Away With Showing Scores At The Top Of The Screen And Spoiling Games

One thing about Americans is that we love to complain, so that's exactly what I'm about to do. This weekend I hit a breaking point that's been boiling inside of me for over a decade now. I simple cannot go another year with March Madness spoiling itself for me and it has to stop.

For the one TV simpletons: Now if you're a crazy person who sits at home with one TV and flips back and forth between CBS, TNT, TBS, and TruTV during the opening weekend of March Madness then this isn't for you. Maybe you simply do not care enough about the tournament and don't have your mood swing on the split second decision of a freshman college basketball player. I wish I had your brain. It's possible you don't have the luxury of being in front of that many TVs because of your job or your girlfriend who refuses such nonsense from occurring. Well, I need every game at my disposal like a mad man. 

For the rest of us who are either watching the tournament from a bar with a plethora of TVs or in our homes with all sorts of setups going on, this blog is for you. The tournament showing live scores of games at the top of the screen is a goddamn NIGHTMARE. 

When I was in college and we'd cut class to watch the Thursday and Friday games, we'd have everyone bring down their TVs to the living room and setup a command center. But because none of the games were synced up you'd have to do something about the top of the screen so we weren't constantly spoiled. There's no point in watching sports if we know what's going to happen. So what did we do? We taped a paper towel across the top of all screens to block out the scores. Yeah, we were geniuses. 

But fast forward to now, the same issue is still plaguing us, only we're at bars now, not college living rooms. Hell even at work on Thursday we were in the gambling cave and were forced to not look at some of the TVs so the other games weren't spoiled. All weekend I found myself in a bar just constantly looking at the top of the screen. I couldn't help it, I have no self control. This is for games on cable, by the way, which are obviously as live as you can get. But nothing is truly live. You could be watching a game on CBS, see the score of another, flip to TBS and be a play behind still. 

THIS CANNOT CONTINUE!

March Madness needs to either make the top of the screen toggle-able like closed captioning is or just get rid of it all together. No matter what happens, you'll never have the scores synced up so one TV doesn't spoil another. You can still do the bottomline ticker as that will just scroll throughout the whole days scores and won't constantly update in real time what's happening for the live ones. 

How nuts is it that pre-2010 CBS would just cycle through all the games on one channel. That's when the scores at the top were necessary. That shit was exhilarating. Now we have all the options and need to adapt. Let's evolve as humans and remove this trouble from our lives. Or….every bar goes with the paper towel method. Someone do something. 

Update: The one TV simpletons have suggested possibly slowing down the scorebug so it's not ahead of the broadcast. This would help, but I'm not sure this is possible. Could be a nice compromise!