Andy Katz By The Numbers

Tuesday, March 17, 2009


So ESPN's Andy Katz recently talked to all 65 coaches, who's teams are participating in the Tournament, and during the one-hour ESPNU show he apparently broke all kinds of records. Not that anyone has kept the stat of "Number of Coaches talked to in a day", but I'm pretty sure no one has ever tackled a total of sixty five in a one-hour span. ESPN just released some of the details surrounding the calls, and the sheer volume of minutes used is rather impressive. Here are the stats....

Records can be made, broken and created. ESPN.com senior writer Andy Katz created a new one yesterday: interviewing the most NCAA Tournament coaches in one show. Katz set out to talk with all 65 coaches during the five-hour ESPNU Coaches Spotlight: College Basketball Special on ESPNU. He ended up getting 63 head coaches and California assistant Jay John on the phone, missing out only on Cal State Northridge’s Bobby Braswell who had a conflict. Interesting nuggets:

- Katz and show producers made approximately 175 calls and reached 47 voicemails in their effort.

- He interviewed four coaches in eight minutes (Syracuse, American, Tennessee and Illinois);

- Fifteen of the 64 interviews happened in the final hour of the show;

- With time of the essence, calls to the Syracuse biology department were not on the agenda, but that is what happened — and multiple times — during attempts to interview Coach Jim Boeheim. They eventually found him; and only two minutes behind schedule.
Wow....that all seems so....unnecessary?

Posted by Awful Announcing at 3:38 PM

8 Comments:

It does seem pointless but there is no debate that Katz is great.

GMoney said...
Mar 17, 2009, 4:09:00 PM  

You can't have it both ways. You can't complain about them being lazy and inaccurate and then criticize them for putting in effort. It was a five-hour show about the coaches in the tournament and Katz did a great job. Leave it alone, or give him credit.

Ed said...
Mar 17, 2009, 4:48:00 PM  

Side question AA - when will you have broadcast maps for Thurs and Fri tourney games?

Mal said...
Mar 17, 2009, 4:53:00 PM  

You can add an interview with Pres. Obama to these stats today.

Onions said...
Mar 17, 2009, 5:44:00 PM  

@Ed --

Let's not act like Katz is getting any substantive information in those 2-minute (4 in 8 minutes) wham-bam phone conversations. Merely getting a guy on the phone for 2 minutes is meaningless. But I sure am impressed that Andy Katz has 65 phone numbers

Anonymous said...
Mar 17, 2009, 6:03:00 PM  

All media outlets have short, pointless interviews with as many coaches as they can these few days. This is probably the only national advertising these coaches can get. Nothing surprising.

Leelee Phoenix said...
Mar 17, 2009, 9:35:00 PM  

I just love how they refer to the CSN coach's absence as a "conflict."

I guess that's a nice way of putting "had to attend son's hearing on burglary charge."

http://rivals.yahoo.com/ncaa/basketball/news?slug=ap-ncaa-coachsson-arrest&prov=ap&type=lgns

Anonymous said...
Mar 18, 2009, 1:21:00 AM  

Nice work!

Brad James said...
Mar 18, 2009, 1:31:00 PM  

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