Ian Eagle will be making his debut as the lead play-by-play announcer for CBS during this year’s NCAA Tournament. Before the games got underway, he had the chance to visit with the Bernstein & Holmes Show on 670 The Score in Chicago.
They conversation went right to the heart of the matter when Eagle was asked, “What does this mean to you that you’re the guy now?”
“I don’t know if I’ve actually gone their mentally,” Eagle said. “I am treating it like I would treat every tournament in terms of preparation, in terms of trying to study and trying to jam this information into your head. Probably the week of the Final Four itself, the flight to Phoenix, walking into the arena that night. It’s probably going to hit me more.”
Eagle is no stranger to calling tournament games, he has been doing that for over 25 years. He was asked about the preparation with the quick turnaround of the NCAA Tournament. “It feels like an information avalanche in many ways,” Eagle responded. “The fact that I’ve done it for so long would make you think, ‘oh, he’s got it down, he has the system, he found the secret sauce.’ No, it feels the same way every year.”
Eagle says during other times of the year when he is juggling multiple sports, both locally and nationally, he can work ahead. For the NCAA Tournament he said, “There is no way to do that. There’s no idea of who you are going to have in the opening round…until you get the phone call or the text or the email Sunday night after the selection show. So, a lot of it is just managing the stress levels…the two or three days leading up to the tournament, I must admit, are probably the most angst-riddled of the year because it’s a little bit out of your control.”
Asked about his relationship with his partners Bill Raftery and Grant Hill, Eagle said he has worked over 600 games with Raftery, many of those when the two were the broadcast team for the then New Jersey Nets. He also told the show about his history with Grant Hill which includes Hill’s first game as a broadcaster when they worked a Notre Dame-Duke basketball game together.
Speaking on the chemistry with his crew, Eagle said, “That part of it has not been hard or arduous, it has been really easy, it’s been really comfortable…There’s a real excellent, built-in trust already in the fact that we did three games this past weekend for the Big 10 championship and a game the previous week, Tennessee and Kentucky, it just feels like we’ve hit the ground running already.”
