College Basketball: 2011 NCAA March Madness May Be Bad for Your Health

Recently, a man in China died after a three-day video game binge. I fear the same fate awaits some of college basketball's biggest fanatics with the expanded television coverage of this year's NCAA tournament.

For the first time in its 73-year history, the NCAA Men's College Basketball Tournament is going live. Through an agreement reached between CBS Sports and Turner Sports, reportedly 14 years and 10.8 billion dollars, each game of this year's Big Dance will be shown in its entirety.

But is that good? Depends on who you ask.

Basic cable subscribers may be disappointed to learn that all four of the play-in games, as well as 24 of the 32 first round games, nine of the 16 second round games, and half of the Sweet 16 games will be shown on the Turner Sports cable affiliates, TNT, TBS and truTV. That's 39 of the 67 scheduled games.

Further examination of the schedule shows it's conceivable that an advancing No.1 seed could go all the way to the Elite 8 before having one of its game broadcast on CBS, leaving the basic cable viewer in the dark on some of the best teams.

Things are not all roses for the premium cable subscribers, either. Many cable companies offer two out of the three Turner Sports affiliates, but few of them offer all three. If your cable package does not include TNT, TBS or truTV, then you don't have the option of watching games on those channels, either.

Then there's the issue of start times. In years past, CBS bunched up their start times so regional games would be ending at roughly the same time. This allowed the network to still show regularly scheduled broadcasts, such as 60 Minutes (CBS will still air 60 Minutes thanks to truTV taking the late Sunday slot). The bunching of start times led to the phenomenon of live look-ins and enhanced the craziness of the tournament thanks to the anticipation of wanting to know what's going on elsewhere.

Now, games could potentially start early in the day and not end until well after midnight ET. Sounds great, huh? Not if your team doesn't tip off until after nine o'clock and you've got to have the kids in bed by eight.

On the surface, expanded television coverage sounds to good to be true for those who count the days until March Madness each year. To them, this is the answer to their prayers.

But for traditionalists, such as myself, who subscribe to the notion of "If it ain't broke, don't fix it," tampering with a product already chalked full of excitement, enhanced by the anticipation of the next live look-in is blasphemous.

Believe it or not, you can have too much of a good thing.