The NCAA seemingly exhausted every scenario before canceling the 2020 men’s and women’s basketball tournaments. While that was unfortunate on a number of levels, CBS Sports and Turner Sports undoubtedly invested a great deal of time setting things up from a broadcast standpoint and, on Monday, word broke from Sports Video Group that the networks would be paying “all technicians and utilities – including freelancers – who were scheduled to work the NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament, Final Four Weekend, and the Division II and Division III National Championship Games.”
International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers director of broadcasting and telecommunications Robert Prunn shared the news and thanked CBS and Turner for their efforts.
“The IBEW extends its sincerest thanks to CBS Sports for this incredible gesture towards our freelance members,” said Prunn. ” We especially would like to recognize the efforts of [CBS Sports Executive Vice President, Operations and Engineering] Patty Power who, from early on, was communicating with us, understood the gravity of the impact on our members, and together with the CBS Sports executive leadership team, worked hard to make this happen.”
While financial details are unavailable, this is something that CBS and Turner did not have to do contractually and, as such, they should receive praise for doing so. There has been a great deal of attention paid to professional sports leagues and how they would be compensating arena employees for lost wages but, on the collegiate side, the broadcasters scheduled for extensive work over a multi-week period could easily be overlooked, and CBS/Turner doing the right thing shouldn’t go unnoticed.
