Courtesy Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

(March 25, 2009) Local viewers of CBS-TV telecasts of the Marquette-Utah State, Wisconsin-Florida State and Marquette-Missouri games noticed that at the ends of those games, the network cut away to other games featuring dramatic finishes.

Count this viewer among those who would prefer to see the entire ending of the home teams' closely contested games - called "constant" games by the network - rather than some other teams' finishes.

What local viewers gain in tournament flavor from other sites, they lose in coherence and continuity of the games they care about the most.

Don't leave a closely contested constant game for any reason, even timeouts, under, say, 3 minutes. Cutaways are OK in the beginning or middle of a game, but not at the end.

By trying to show both games to viewers particularly interested in just one of them, you end up missing portions of both.

CBS Sports vice president of programming Mike Aresco explained in an interview on Sirius XM Radio the decision to leave the end of the Louisville-Siena game Sunday in the Louisville and Albany markets to show portions of the end of Marquette-Missouri.

"We always plan on staying with a constant," Aresco said. "In some situations, and we've done this over the years, we'll try to get to just a buzzer-beater and get right back to the constant. In this particular case we had an unusual situation that developed. You had two exciting potential buzzer-beaters at the same time. We're trying to what we call pingpong back and forth and then there were some bizarre circumstances in those games and we did use commercials as best we could."

Aresco said CBS made a mistake by not getting back quickly enough to Louisville-Siena in those teams' markets.

You can't get into trouble if you stay with a constant game at the end, if it's close. Just don't switch.

Aresco said it was a "control room error" that caused CBS to cut away from Wisconsin-Florida State game on Friday night while the final shot was in the air.