The networks' scheduling strategy was to stack competitive games in the early windows to build audience, and they were rewarded with some real corkers, including Morehead State's upset of Louisville, buzzer-beaters by Butler and Temple, Kentucky's narrow win and Richmond's upset of Vanderbilt.

What the partners needed were a couple of upsets that didn't involve a team that would cost them viewers down the line, and it would appear that is what they got from the first day.

I wandered amidst three television sets here in DVR Central, but the spacing of games was sufficient that you could get by well enough with one TV and particularly well with a TV and a March Madness on Demand broadband connection. West Virginia's tenuous win over Clemson on CBS ended 14 minutes before Butler's buzzer-beater, for example, and Morehead State finished 16 minutes ahead of Temple-Penn State.

The only technical glitch called to my attention came about 12:15 p.m., when truTV cut to about 30 seconds of Family Guy on TBS during a commercial. However, the problem was cleared up by the time action resumed, and viewers didn't miss a second of the Butler-Old Dominion game.

I was curious how the networks would have enough studio work for two crews, one led by Greg Gumbel and Ernie Johnson in New York and one by Matt Winer in Atlanta, but the timing was such, particularly as games came to an end, that it would have been a real scramble to funnel four windows through one studio.

My general impression, based on my strolls between sets, was that for all the pre-Tournament attention paid to Charles Barkley (present company included, to be fair), Kenny Smith was the most effective analyst. I particularly enjoyed his description of the Butler outcome. On last-second plays, Smith said, "One guy plays the shot. Everybody else plays the rebound. If you don't do that, you have tip-ins," which is what we had in that game.

There were at least two "onions" proclamations from Bill Raftery in Denver, where he and Verne Lundquist called the Morehead State and Richmond upsets (doesn't it seem that Lundquist gets more than his share of these, by the way?) They pulled the trigger too quickly on what they thought should have been a foul call at the end of the Morehead State game but backtracked on the replay.

Other general observations: truTV, I am happy to say, came up with some new promos and didn't pound viewers repeatedly with the chest-thumper and loud talker, which appeared a combined 40 times during the Tuesday night doubleheader. I liked the overhead scoreline that displayed games and times for each game in progress.

March Madness on Demand worked smoothly for me on Comcast's broadband network, although I'm not crazy about the fact that the screen goes dark during commercials and you can't mute the sound or change to another game. The MMOD mobile application took forever to load on the iPhone but worked well (albeit 40 seconds behind the TV picture) once it loaded.