Seth Davis, NCAA Analyst for CBS Sports, Doesn't Really Know More Than the Next Guy

Seth Davis’s five favorite songs got the I-Man’s stamp of approval, and so did his father Lanny, who worked in the Clinton White House and is one of the more decent guys that Imus has ever met.

“He’s an even better dad than he is a guy,” said Davis, a CBS college basketball analyst and Sports Illustrated writer whose book When March Went Mad is out in paperback.

Like most people, Davis did not expect this year’s Final Four to consist of Duke, Butler, Michigan State, and West Virginia. But, he told Imus, “That’s the beauty of it!”

Never one to be wishy-washy with his picks (because, he says, “there’s no slow way to drive off a cliff”), Davis said this has been a dangerous tournament in which to make predictions. For instance, nobody would have guessed that nine-seed Northern Iowa would have beaten top-seeded Kansas in the second round of play.

“That, to me, is what makes the NCAA tournament so unique,” said Davis. “It’s ultimately about crowning a champion, but it’s not solely about crowning a champion.”

The quasi-underdog team now is Butler, a five-seed that knocked off two-seed Kansas State last weekend. “Besides being a small school with 4,000 students from an out of the way conference, it’s right here in Indianapolis, six miles from where the Final Four is playing,” said Davis.

Back in October, Davis had actually picked Butler to go to the Final Four, but as the season progressed it became difficult to tell whether they won every game in the Horizon League because they were so good, or because the league was so bad.

“Maybe it’s both,” Davis speculated. “But you don’t know until they get into a situation like the NCAA tournament.”

Tomorrow’s game between Michigan State and Butler begins just after 6pm ET, and the Duke-West Virginia game will begin shortly after the first one ends.  Davis, Greg Gumbel and Greg Anthon, will host a pre-game show on CBS starting at 4pm ET, where they’ll rope in people like Imus with a sappy story about some coach’s sick kid.

“I’m immediately sold on that,” Imus confessed, and wondered if his guest approves of the notion of expanding the NCAA tournament from 64 to 96 teams.  

A CBS employee, Davis is pulling for whatever means keeping the games on his network. He would also never criticize a college athletic department, so many of which are cash-strapped, for wanting to make more money.

“I worry it devalues the regular season, I worry it devalues gong to the NCAA tournament,” he admitted. “But once the tournament starts and the games are underway, I think people are going to watch and still get excited about it.”

Lord knows the I-Man will.

-Julie Kanfer