March Madness Spreads on the Web

Cameron Crouch, PCWorld.com

With the NCAA men's basketball tournament moving into its last weeks, you might be wondering how you can keep tabs on all the action without gluing yourself to the La-Z-Boy in front of the TV.

Fortunately, the Web has some answers. A broad selection of sports sites offer news, stats, video clips, and analysis of this year's tournament. You'll find some action with the usual sports-watching suspects, such as CBS Sportsline, ESPN, and Yahoo Sports.

For this particular sports event, you'll also find material on the official FinalFour.net and NCAA Basketball. Even shopping comparison site PriceGrabber.com is getting into the action; on its March Madness page, you can compare, say, Duke University and the University of Southern California before the opening tip-off.

And online sports supplements aren't confined to your PC. Internet wireless service OmniSky can keep you posted via your Palm or Handspring Visor.

Schools Strut Online

If you're rooting for a specific school (perhaps your alma mater), you may want to check the school's site first for the inside scoop. One of the top seeds, Stanford University, has a tournament tracker page devoted to March Madness. There you can find previews on the next game, a tournament history of Stanford's victories, and stats on the Cardinal and its competition. Many colleges have good fan sites as well, such as Stanford-watcher The Bootleg.

At the official Web site of perennial contender Duke, you'll find links to audio coverage of the games as well as tournament press conferences.

Besides inside information on teams and their seasons, individual college sites rely heavily on tournament and general sports media sites for coverage. Dedicated to March Madness, FinalFour.net, developed by the NCAA and Quokka, offers some of the most comprehensive multimedia coverage. But to get the most out of the site, you'll need the free Flash player for animations, RealPlayer or QuickTime for video and audio, and Adobe Acrobat Reader for tournament brackets.

At FinalFour.net you can check out a TotalCast Live page for each game. An interactive multimedia broadcast of each game, TotalCast lets you review the action shot by shot with an interactive diagram of the court, listen to play-by-play commentary, and check who's on the floor and who's on the bench--all live.

FinalFour.net will even send scores to your mobile phone. The service is provided by Air2Web and requires text messaging capabilities.

Usual and Unusual Suspects

As with any major sports event, major broadcast stations supplement their coverage online. Among the most thorough are CBS Sportsline, CNN/SI, and ESPN. At many of them, you can play, too. Besides the schedules, color commentary, stats, and predictions, you'll find such interactive features as pools and fantasy leagues.

Some sites, such as Sportsline, even let you watch videos of previous games you might have missed. Of course, streaming video quality depends on your connection and still doesn't quite match live television coverage.

For a bigger stake in the action, check out ESPN's Men's Tournament Challenge, where you can pick your favorites in a competition with other fans. A leader board shows who's winning the predictions game.

Besides standard sports-news sites and portals, unlikely sites such as PriceGrabber.com have also caught the March Madness fever.

PriceGrabber.com provides extensive comparative information for shopping. "We're doing exactly the same thing at our March Madness site," says Dan Goldman, director of marketing.

Using statistical information from FinalFour.net and CBS Sportsline, PriceGrabber.com's March Madness site lets you compare any two or more teams across a variety of metrics, Goldman says. "There are about twelve categories of statistics; for each one, we highlight in red which team has better stats," he says.

For instance, a comparison of Stanford versus the University of Cincinnati--paired in the regional semifinals--shows Stanford is stronger in 11 of the 12 categories, which include wins, losses, average points, rebounds, and assists. PriceGrabber.com doesn't offer a lot of commentary, just pure statistics.

"We're trying to provide access to the information without clutter, let you organize it as you want," Goldman says. "We do have a little trivia there as well, like why Georgetown [University's team] is called the Hoyas."

Wireless services are even getting into the Final Four fever. OmniSky, which provides wireless Web services to PDAs, has a NCAA Tournament Channel. It pools scores, schedules, and play-by-play action from sites such as CBS Sportsline, the Sports Network, and Sporting News into one location, making it easier for handheld users to keep up-to-date on the road.

The Web Does Sports

If you're keeping up with NCAA action on the Web this year, you're not alone.

According to PC Data, ESPN.com was the most visited news and media site for the week ending March 17. CBS Sportsline and CNN/SI were also in the top ten. Meanwhile, FinalFour.net became the ninth most popular sports site.

Nothing on the Web compares yet to the excitement of seeing a game in person, or even watching live broadcasts (still better on your TV than your PC). And you won't find complete live games streamed to your PC. Still, the Net offers a virtual community for March Madness fans who are eager for the troves of interactive information, multimedia coverage, and contests that are out there. And unlike TV, where you'll hear as much about the other guys as your team, the Web lets you pick and choose what you want to know.