Live Blogging and the NCAA

Now I understand why press row at a College basketball game generally doesn't have an internet connection.

The web info game (The Forum of Fargo-Moorhead, North Dakota) reports that live blogging at NCAA events is a serious issue that they are trying to deal with, meaning they are trying to prohibit.

A fantasy of mine as a blogger for fans of The Summit League (formerly the Mid-Continent Conference) and now for fans of The Horizon League, which Valparaiso University is now a part of, has been to be able to blog a conference tournament courtside. I never seriously tried to pursue this because it seemed like a pipe-dream that I had no right to expect to be fulfilled. I just thought it would be neat. As it is, I have settled for posting my observations from my hotel room each night.

At the same time, I have often noticed that the in-game scores of other games that play-by-play announcers relay during timeouts of the game they are doing are sometimes way behind where those games actually are, and in this age of the internet, I have wondered why that would be, since someone at the corresponding radio station should be able to keep up with other games better than that. Now I wonder if the above article explains in some sense why this would be so. I have been told that they get scores via phone hookups to the other schools in the conference, and the time it takes for the score to travel from the control room to courtside, plus the time it takes to reach a timeout so there is a chance to pass on those scores might well explain the disparity. It appears that they don't have an internet connection courtside, so they can't just directly check for updates. At the time, this seemed backward, but the above article presents some plausible reasons for this.