Great to see Raft get an opportunity to work the big games after all these years. He has been a supreme voice for college basketball.

Sporting News’ Mike DeCourcy: “You see Bill Raftery on TV, wonder: Is he that cool in real life? The answer is no. He is way cooler. So delighted for him.”

The official release:

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Turner Sports and CBS Sports today announced that Bill Raftery and Grant Hill will call the NCAA Final Four and National Championship this year.

Hill and Raftery will join the team of Jim Nantz and reporter Tracy Wolfson to call games together throughout the 2015 NCAA Tournament, culminating with the NCAA Division I Men’s Basketball Final Four and National Championship from Lucas Oil Stadium in Indianapolis.  This year’s NCAA Tournament marks the first time Raftery and Hill will call the Final Four and National Championship on television.

The full NCAA Tournament commentator line-up will be announced at a later date.

Raftery is entering his 33^rd year calling the NCAA Tournament.  Hill will debut this year as a game analyst after joining the collective NCAA Tournament coverage last year as a studio analyst.

Nantz, Raftery, Hill and Wolfson will team for the first time to call the Big Ten men’s basketball tournament semi-finals on Saturday, March 14 and championship game on Sunday, March 15 on CBS.

For the fifth consecutive year, CBS Sports and Turner Sports will provide live coverage of all 67 games from the 2015 NCAA Division I Men’s Basketball Championship across four national television networks – TBS, CBS, TNT and truTV.  The Final Four on Saturday, April 4 will be televised on TBS and the National Championship on Monday, April 6 will air on CBS.

Hill, a two-time NCAA basketball champion at Duke University and member of the College Basketball Hall of Fame, joined Turner Sports in 2013 following a 19-year NBA career.  He currently serves as a game and studio analyst for Turner Sports, as well as host of NBA TV’s weekly NBA Inside Stuff show.

Raftery joined CBS Sports in 1983.  He has been a key member of the Network’s college basketball team serving as a regular-season and NCAA Tournament game analyst for 33 years.  Raftery has been a game analyst for radio coverage of the NCAA Final Four for the last 23 years.  He also was elected as a 2015 inductee to the National Sportscasters and Sportswriters Association Hall of Fame.

It has long been speculated that Super Bowl ratings aren’t accurate because they don’t take into account the number of people watching the game at parties and bars.

A case in point could be in looking at my town’s rating for Sunday’s Super Bowl.

The game did a 54.9 rating in Chicago; 1 local ratings point is worth nearly 35,000 homes. That was nearly five points higher than the 50.2 local rating for the 2007 Bears-Indianapolis Super Bowl.

Now how is it possible a Chicago rating for a Bears Super Bowl could be lower (by 166,000 homes, no less) than a game featuring one team from the East Coast and the other from the West? Answer: It is highly unlikely.

Here’s a theory:

In 2007, there were countless parties and mass gatherings at bars with multitudes of Bears fans watching the big game throughout the Chicago area. Those viewers are not counted in the final rating since Nielsen bases the number on people watching in their homes. The actual rating had to be much, much higher than 50.2.

Fast forward to Sunday. A huge storm hits the area. Parties are cancelled; people don’t go to bars. Instead, they stay in to watch the game. Nielsen registers those homes, and voila, the rating is larger for a non-Bear Super Bowl.

Look no further than Chicago registering a 44.8 rating for Super Bowl 48 in 2014. While this year’s game was much better, it wasn’t more than 10 ratings points better.

The Chicago dynamic seems to support the long-time contention by the networks about the Super Bowl rating being too low. Richard Sandomir addressed the issue in a story in the New York Times Saturday.

“I really believe that the number is underreported substantially,” said NBC Sports chairman Mark Lazarus during a news media conference call. “If you take 120 million or so and add the parties, there’s no doubt in my mind that one in every two Americans is watching the game.”

Alan Wurtzel, president of research and media development for NBC Universal, talked about the impact of out-of-home viewing.

“Nielsen has said that their methodology was designed to deal with in-home viewing, not out-of-home,” Wurtzel said in the New York Times story. “The issue now is that as the medium has become more portable and the technology more personal, it isn’t about people watching at the health club or bar, but on a smartphone or tablet. And we know this behavior is only increasing. It will be the new normal, and we have to account for it.”

Expect NBC to examine what happened with Chicago viewers Sunday.

My Chicago Tribune review of watching way too much Super Bowl coverage yesterday.

You also can access here via my Twitter feed at @Sherman_Report.

Some excerpts:

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Observations of the stuff that aired in between commercials Sunday:

* How long before Johnny Weir and Tara Lipinski replace Brian Williams as co-anchors of NBC’s Nightly News?

* Al Michaels opened the game by saying, “The footballs have been weighed and measured, I guarantee it.” The NFL, though, denied NBC’s request to film the actual process. Now that would have been good television, but apparently the league didn’t want to add to the sideshow.

* Michaels, who worked his ninth Super Bowl, knows how to drive the telecast in the big game. He is a pro who hits all the right notes. He will be 73 when he does his 10th Super Bowl in 2018. It won’t be his last.

* Leave it to Bob Costas to pin down Tom Brady on “deflatgate.” The Patriots QB sure sounded guilty based on his non-answers to Costas’ pointed questions.

Cris Collinsworth clearly wasn’t buying, saying the interview raised doubts about Brady’s innocence.

* Not sure who is giving PR advice to Commissioner Roger Goodell, but he deserves to be pounded for refusing to grant NBC an interview Sunday. It takes a lot of nerve to tell Marshawn Lynch he has to talk and then duck a TV partner that pays the league billions.

* Speaking of not talking, NFL Network’s Michael Silver showed a side of Lynch and his work in his hometown of Oakland. Rich Eisen wondered, “Why couldn’t he talk about that?”

Patriots may have won, but Deflatgate is not going away.

Bryan Curtis of Grantland has an interesting perspective of the Marshawn Lynch media tussle at the Super Bowl.

Curtis writes about the absurdity of the situation. The media is upset with Lynch because he won’t talk. However, if he does talk, he isn’t likely to say anything.

Then again, there are a lot of things that are absurd in life. It doesn’t excuse Lynch from acting like a complete jerk.

Thank you, Howard Eskin. From Curtis’ story:

Marshawn Lynch had just finished his daily press conference, and Howard Eskin’s face was the color of the stone formations at Red Rock State Park.

Eskin is a handsome, Hans Gruberesque guy who does TV and sports radio in Philadelphia. He had been — to use a phrase slung around the media rooms in Phoenix this week — just doing his job. Eskin squeezed his way past reporters and got close to Lynch. He asked a question. OK, it wasn’t anice question. Or a question that was meant to solicit an answer.

“Marshawn,” Eskin said, “why do you have to be a jerk to all of us?”

“You know why I’m here,” Lynch said.

“It’s not hard to answer a question …” Eskin told me after Wednesday’s presser. “What’s so hard to talk about what it means to be here the second straight year?”

And at the Super Bowl, no less. “The biggest game of the year!” Eskin continued. “He makes the NFL a charade. I hope they fine him for the hat, because they can’t fine him for the other things.”

There were a couple of interesting perspectives on the Marshawn Lynch situation from Rodney Harrison and Tony Dungy on NBC’s teleconference yesterday.

Harrison believes Lynch has a responsibility that goes beyond simply talking to the media.

“Obviously, I’ve been in a lot of locker rooms and I’ve dealt with guys that didn’t really want to deal with the media.  When I look at Marshawn Lynch, I look at the tremendous platform and the opportunity that he has.  He has a lot of people and a lot of kids looking up to him.  As an African‑American man that has seen his grandparents not able to have that same platform or to even go out and struggle to try to get an education and get held back for not being able to do certain things, it’s just very frustrating to me when you have the type of opportunity that he has and not to utilize it.  Because there are a lot of kids and a lot of young people that look up to him that he could really influence.

“So, yes, it’s important.  It’s his job, but also he has a tremendous platform and opportunity to really influence the youth, and that’s what it’s about.  As much as he may not think that he’s a role model.  They’re kids, they love skittles because of Marshawn Lynch.  They’re kids that are running in the backyard and trying to do different things that he brings each and every week.  When you play in the National Football League, it’s not just about breaking tackles and scoring touchdowns, but it’s about representing your culture and representing everything that the people before you have worked so hard and struggled so you can have certain opportunities.”

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Meanwhile, Dungy talked about his dealing with a media-weary Marvin Harrison in Indianapolis.

“Marvin did not like to talk.  He was very quiet and a little afraid of the cameras.  What I talked to Marvin about was it’s part of the job.  It’s like lifting weights and going to meetings, it’s like practicing.  It’s like playing in the game.  It’s a part of what you have to do.  Just go out there and do your best and we’re going to be fine.  Marvin took that, and he was never one who was going to give long answers.  He was never going to have his own press conferences.  But he came around and did a good job.  I think that’s how I would approach it.  Every coach is different.  Every player is different and their relationship with their players.”