TOM HOFFARTH on the MEDIA: NCAA at odds with its messages

Want an upset pick during the first weekend of the NCAA men's basketball tournament? It'll come when one of the broadcasting teams happens to reveal a point spread during a game you're watching.

Don't wait for it.

The fact that sixth-seeded UCLA started off in Vegas sports books as a brow-raising 2-point underdog against No.11 seed Minnesota in tonight's second-round game in Austin, Texas -- and then the line was then pushed to a 3 once bettors started laying money -- has become an intriguing angle to this contest. Those watching on TV, with an office pool bracket in front of them full of red marks following Thursday's first full day of contests, will likely be aware of what's going on in relation to a key injury suffered by UCLA's Jordan Adams during the Pac-12 tournament last Friday.

But try tying that into why the Bruins have become a real gamble among Vegas bettors, and the odds are real that someone at the NCAA, or an advertiser, or at the very least a network exec, will become the ones most upset.

With all the high-speed media technology available to find info like that -- except during the course of the live televised game itself -- does it seem we reached a point where we can stop pretending this point-spread elephant in the room doesn't exist, even if you're treading into quasi-amateur college sports territory littered with NCAA-sponsored anti-gambling PSAs?

"I can see why they don't want that information out there, but it's hypocrisy for the NCAA, especially since it doesn't cost them any money," said's RJ Bell, the popular media go-to Vegas-based betting expert.

"There was once the classic question asked to NFL commissioner Pete Rozelle: If you could eliminate all sports betting, would you? For anyone with a financial interest in it, the only answer is `no.'

"But here, like in the NCAA, they get the best of both worlds. They can act indignant, but they still cash the checks driven by sports betting. It's crazy for them to do anything else, but it's nothing less than pure hypocrisy."

Bell's calculation is that the madness of the event will lead to $12 billion wagered on it around the world via all vehicles - including office pools, off-shore betting and illegal bookies. Some industry estimates are that the overall handle legally bet on the games in Las Vegas could reach $100 million, surpassing the record of $98.8 million wagered on the last Super Bowl.

By no miscalculation in scheduling, Colin Cowherd's syndicated ESPN Radio show brought Bell into the conversation Thursday morning less than 10 minutes before the first games' tipoffs to crunch numbers on bracket-pick tips.

Bell's analysis: "If UCLA wins, you're going to hear a lot about an upset, but Vegas is saying no."

Sal Iacono, aka "Cousin Sal" from ABC's "Jimmy Kimmel Live" show, calls UCLA-Minnesota a "coin flip," and perhaps you'll see more of his prognostications on the website, where he's become a resident currency tosser. editor Bill Simmons has called Iacono "one of the great gamblers of all time, or at least one of the least successful." It's that tongue-in-cheek approach that allows Iacono, as others have tried in the past, to get away with letting their picks known to the TV audience.

"Maybe the NCAA has to pretend to be more sensitive to it and be more righteous, but I think we try to do it all with a wink," said Iacono, who said his entry point into gambling came from watching his Aunt Chippy play video poker and offering her advice, which led to him as a 6-year-old emptying out the school playground by flipping baseball cards.

"I wish we could all come clean with it, but I understand how it works and try not to cross any line. The biggest concern is the information can be taken out of context, that I'm gambling through illegal means. That's certainly not the case."

Simmons, meanwhile, sat at home in L.A. today and led a four-man live podcast, viewable through the site's YouTube Channel. He made it clear that "gambling advice and discussion will be legal during the live streaming. It's all good. We're going to talk about the stuff that we talk about as we watch these games."

Iacono's TV gaming career goes back to teaming up with Kimmel on picking NFL games for Fox's pregame show more than a decade ago. They've continued to give picks through skits on Kimmel's late-night show, all the while wary of how ABC execs interpret it.

Iacono has also been involved in celebrity-driven fantasy sports leagues and now helps promote a site called There, contestants can put up money, get matched up against an opponent, pick five players from NCAA tournament games that day, and win the bet if they have the best combined stats. The process is set up to avoid government shutdown related to how online poker companies have been taken to task in recent years.

Pushing that fine line on hiding betting lines when college kids are involved may be sheer fantasy for some - even as more college students find it easier to watch tournament games on their iPhones and toggle over to sites to find odds and make wagers.

"We'll always be referred to as `what the experts say' or `what our friends in the desert say,"' Bell said. "It's pretty clear that with every passing year, the prevalence of odds as part of the conversation grows. It's is really unstoppable at this point."

Fox still giving NASCAR the Hollywood treatment

Fox should know better by now than to pretend that Fontana is nowhere close to downtown Los Angeles, no matter how it all looks to someone based in the Deep South through a Google map.

Often passed off as being Hollywood-adjacent, Sunday's NASCAR Sprint Cup Auto Club 400 at Auto Club Speedway (noon, Channel 11, with pre-race at 11:30 a.m.) might even lead some viewers to believe spectators just walked up the street from the Fox Sports headquarters on the Pico lot near Rancho Park in L.A. to soak in the sun on a different beachfront.

Any way to finally come clean on the fact we're talking about a distance of a good 60-plus miles, and at least an hour-and-a-half freeway trip on a decent day if you happen to get lost on the way to finding Interstate 15 heading to Las Vegas?

The so-called "Hollywood Hotel" pre-race show with Chris Myers, plus Darrell and Michael Waltrip, will have first crack at it. Race-caller Mike Joy, with Darrell Waltrip and Larry McReynolds in the booth, plus Steve Byrnes, Krista Voda, Matt Yocum and Jeff Hammond reporting from the pits, can also elaborate if they so choose to supplement the visuals.

Unfortunately, the coverage does not include any of the elaborate Gyro-cams, cable-suspended rigs or Erin Andrews combing the pits for awkward celebrity interaction, all featured during the network's coverage of the Daytona 500 only last month.

Fox's Speed Channel has live practice and qualifying from Fontana today (11:30 a.m. to 6p.m.) and Saturday (9:30 a.m. to 1:30 p.m.).

ESPN's coverage of the Nationwide Series race (Saturday, 1:30 p.m.) includes Allen Bestwick and analysts Rusty Wallace and Andy Petree. The NASCAR Now studio show starts its Sunday race preview coverage at 6 a.m. on ESPN2.


==A healthy discussion about the NFL's approach to preventing injury, driven by co-hosts Andrew Siciliano and Andrea Kremer, will appear on the NFL Network (5 p.m. Monday) called "Health of the Game." Safety issues and recent rule changes that affect players in light of injury-related problems will be hashed out in a round-table discussion by free agent defensive back Ronde Barber, Pittsburgh safety Ryan Clark, Hall of Fame running back Marshall Faulk, New York Giants co-owner John Mara, Houston Texans GM Rick Smith, Atlanta Falcons president Rich McKay and Cincinnati Bengals head coach Marvin Lewis.


==As more major sporting events cross the line from traditional network TV outlets to the land of cableville, you can read between the lines if you saw Turner team members Charles Barkley, Kenny Smith and Ernie Johnson as the featured components of the New York studio crew that came up Thursday morning on CBS' launch of the NCAA men's basketball tournament. The Sports Business Journal reports this week that TBS "appears likely" to take over the Final Four and two Elite Eight games starting in 2014 - it's based on little-known clause in their 14-year agreement with CBS signed back in 2010. The original plans were for CBS to do the title game through 2015, then start alternating with TBS. But SBJ sources confirmed Turner can decide to take it a year early, without paying anything extra since the networks split all money the networks make during the event. So why wouldn't it? An announcement of that decision could come sometime later this spring.

==One other note on the SBJ story, and how moving the event to cable could affect rates for subscribers: TNT costs us about $1.27 a month, mostly due to the NBA rights deal. TBS goes for 62 cents - could that increase if it has the NCAA hoops final? And then there's TruTV, home channel for tonight's UCLA-Minnesota game, going for 12 cents a month. If that makes any sense.

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