As the NCAA works to enhance and promote its brand during the NCAA Tournament, viewers lose a bit of character, geography and personality while watching games on TV.How? Those sanitized, standardized basketball courts at each of the venues. Boring.
It years past, viewers knew the locations of games (or the schools hosting the events) just by looking at the court.
Sure, the boring blue NCAA-sanctioned courts have the name of the arena in one end zone and the city hosting the event in the other, but it's nothing like tuning in and knowing withing a few seconds that the game was at The Pit in New Mexico or some other historic or well-known facility.
Instead, games have been sanitized and whitewashed, like watching a movie on cable that's been shown so many times on TV that the version that hits the screen no longer includes all the original dialogue. It's still interesting, but not nearly as good.