ESPN Preps Bracket-Hungry Viewers With 24-Hour Tournament Challenge Marathon

Ambitious studio effort leveraged five sets in three cities across the country

In the days between Selection Sunday and the start of the NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament, there’s a window when sports fans are hungry to learn as much as they can about college basketball before sitting down to fill out a bracket. ESPN was there to feed that hunger with a 24-hour marathon of live coverage and analysis of the tournament designed to educate fans on the matchups and promote participation in the network’s online Tournament Challenge contests.

“This is one of the true elements of sports Americana,” says Tom Archer, who, along with Kate Leonard, served as coordinating producer on the project. “Everybody fills out a bracket, and you don’t need to be an expert in college basketball to have fun picking your teams and picking a national champion. Our goal is to surround the 24 hours of coverage with fun and some degree of differentiating brackets and Tournament Challenge content both in the linear presentation and in our digital and social platforms. We want to make it as easy as possible for viewers to know how to sign up, how to enter, how many ways you can play. It’s up to us to give you information on how to win.”

The Tournament Challenge marathon began on ESPN with the NCAA Women’s Selection Special at 7 p.m. ET on Monday and ran through to a special edition of Tournament Challenge at 4:30-7 p.m. on ESPN2 on Tuesday.

The lineup of programming was produced out of three studios in Bristol, CT; one in Los Angeles; and a remote set at the Paris Hotel in Las Vegas. It features Tournament Challenge-themed editions of popular shows, including Mike & Mike, First Take, Outside the Lines, Jalen & Jacoby, The Jump, and SportsNation, plus live cut-ins from SportsCenter. 

Archer and Leonard worked closely with Creative Services and Studio teams to make the best use of technology throughout the shows, including virtual graphics from Vizrt and telestration technology for analyst breakdowns. Much of the footage and content that was run through the shows was pulled together by Managing Producer Dave Arnold. Building relevant clips that could be shared among all the shows was made simpler through the network’s Quantel (now Snell Advanced Media) media-management system.

“If there has ever been a greater example of cooperation across the campus to make sure all of our bases are covered, this is definitely a project that has done that,” says Archer. “It’s taken a lot of people and departments working together over the past six to eight weeks, fine-tuning the shifts and needs of the various shows.”