Ncaa Basketball Tournament

The Oregon "Tall Firs" posed for the first NCAA championship photograph dressed in suits and ties. Everything was black and white then. Bobby Anet, who scored 10 points in the 46-33 win over Ohio State, cradled the trophy in his lap. The year was 1939. Man, are those gone-with-the-wind days. There are now more members on the NCAA selection committee (10) than schools (eight) involved in the first tournament. Committee members have been huddled up in an Indianapolis hotel all week surrounded by pie charts and nondairy creamer.

Top-seeded teams No. 1 Kansas: The Jayhawks are making their 22nd consecutive NCAA tournament appearance ? the longest active streak in the nation ? after winning their seventh straight Big 12 Conference regular-season title and the conference tournament for the fourth time in five years. Yet, both UCLA (77-76) and USC (70-68) nearly beat Kansas in Lawrence in December. No. 2 Notre Dame: A loss to Louisville in a Big East Conference tournament semifinal probably cost the Fighting Irish a No. 1 seeding.

Shannon Ryan predicts the 68-team NCAA men's basketball tournament field: (AQ denotes automatic qualifier) American East: Boston (AQ). Atlantic Coast: Duke (AQ), Florida State, North Carolina, North Carolina State, Maryland, Virginia Tech. Atlantic Sun: Lipscomb (AQ). Atlantic Ten: Temple (AQ), Dayton, Richmond, Xavier. Big East: Pittsburgh (AQ), Georgetown, Marquette, Notre Dame, Seton Hall, Syracuse, Villanova, West Virginia. Big Sky: Weber State (AQ)

The road to the Final Four will have a new look next season. On Thursday, the NCAA's board of directors approved expansion from 65 to 68 teams and endorsed a proposal to add three more opening-round games to the schedule. It's only the second time in a quarter-century that the NCAA has increased the number of teams competing for the men's national championship. Now it's time to start mapping out the details, which could include putting at-large teams in the early games. "The [men's basketball]

The great programming migration to cable continues. Turner Broadcasting, just one week after signing former NBC late-night host Conan O'Brien, has teamed up with CBS in a 14-year, $10.8-billion deal for television and Internet rights to the immensely popular NCAA March Madness college basketball tournament. The move comes as broadcast television struggles with rising programming costs and greater competition for viewers and advertisers. Although the NCAA tournament is a strong performer for CBS, the costs of covering the games were starting to outweigh the benefits for the network.

It was the middle of Jon Scheyer's junior season and Duke was reeling. The Blue Devils uncharacteristically had dropped four of six games in the Atlantic Coast Conference, sending the fan base into a tizzy. That's when the Duke coaching staff decided before a nonconference road game to make some changes, chief among them was handing the bulk of the point-guard duties to Scheyer. It was a move that helped salvage Duke's season — the Blue Devils won the ACC tournament — and paved the road for this season's trip to the Final Four, Duke's first since 2004.

Baylor Coach Scott Drew may not have too many friends among his Big 12 coaching brethren. But on Friday, Drew and his Baylor team did what few teams have been able to do all season — quiet St. Mary's center Omar Samhan. With its 72-49 victory over St. Mary's in the Midwest Regional of the NCAA tournament, a Baylor program that was left in ruins following scandal and tragedy in 2003 is now on the cusp of earning its first Final Four berth since 1950. "I'm not thinking about the Final Four.

CBS' coverage of the NCAA men's basketball tournament, combined with the customary strength of its regular programming, made it the most-watched network for the 19th time in the prime-time television season's 26 weeks. Although Fox Broadcasting got a 1-2 finish from the week's two "American Idol" broadcasts, CBS had each of the next eight most-watched shows and averaged 10.82 million viewers for its prime-time programming between March 15 and Sunday. CBS was the most-watched network on Thursday, Friday and Saturday, when its prime-time programming consisted entirely of the NCAA men's basketball tournament coverage, according to figures released Tuesday by the Nielsen Co. The week's most-watched cable program was Sunday's premiere of the Discovery Channel nature documentary series "Life," which averaged 6.14 million viewers.