The Week In Television

the guide

Thursday 3/14 CBS
? NCAA Tournament
Buzzer-beaters. Cinderellas. And enough references to the Big Dance to make one long for Saturday Night Fever.

Thursday 3/21 USA 12 PM
?The Players Championship
Charles Barkley's favorite golfer (other than himself) returns to Sawgrass to defend his tide. Last year Tiger Woods (below) beat Vijay Singh by a stroke to earn $1,080,000.

Thursday 3/21 ABC 8 PM
?World Figure Skating Championships
Who needs Survivor when we've got reality television like this? The world's best figure skaters—minus gold medalists Sarah Hughes and Jamie Sale and David Pelletier—head to Nagano for four more days of kissing and crying.

sizzling & fizzling

Who Was Hot and Who Was Not

?Following the opening lap of Sunday's MBNA America 500 on Fox, analyst Darrell Waltrip was prescient—"This is a track he really runs well [on]"—about Dale Earnhardt Jr.'s prospects in the race: He finished second to Tony Stewart.

?Following ESPN's presentation of A Season on the Brink, its Outside the Lines featured a roundtable with members of the 1985-86 Indiana team that was the subject of the film. Host Bob Ley also interviewed forward Daryl Thomas, target of many Bobby Knight tirades that season.

?Class move by CBS to allow ESPN to broadcast the Alcorn State-Siena NCAA tournament play-in game; the new TV contract giving ESPN the rights to telecast the game doesn't begin until next season.

?In an otherwise excellent NCAA selection show, CBS showed a live shot of forlorn Gonzaga coaches and players reacting to being seeded sixth in the West but inexplicably failed to return to Spokane to interview coach Mark Few about the slight.