TCU Unscripted went unedited on Monday producing their first-ever live show before the NCAA basketball national championship between Purdue and UConn. 

TCU Unscripted is a weekly student-produced sports talk show. This week’s 28-minute-16-second pre-game show went live Monday at 7:50, 30 minutes before tip-off of the national championship.

Junior journalism and sports broadcasting majors Sarah Smith, Emil Asaf, and Gavin Hughes anchored the show, which featured 10 minutes of packages produced by other members of the unscripted cast.

Executive producer Ethan Love said producing a live show took more preparation in advance. 

“I really wanted to make it special,” he said. “For our first live show, we wanted to make it a big thing.”

Love said they spent the past two weeks promoting the upcoming show on social media, creating packages and stacking the show so it would flow well.

“I wanted to make it as easy as possible on Gavin, Emil, and Sarah,” he said. “I wanted things to naturally flow into one another, so we’d have a talking point that would center around something that would flow into the next package.”

The packages included an interview with the founder of Unscripted, interviews with TCU students who tried to predict the National Championship, analysis of Unscripted’s March Madness bracket challenge, a segment about Dan Hurley and Matt Painter and a dive into the history of back to back NCAA basketball national champions. 

The first package almost went up in flames before the show began on Monday when the crew figured out the audio wasn’t working during their check, only six minutes before they planned to go live.

“We were in a mad scramble,” Love said. “I just went back to the computer, saved it again and exported it again. With like three minutes to spare, we got it in there and working.”

Asaf said nerves can be another challenge to deal with when anchoring for a live show.

“There are no retakes,” he said. “Trying to sound calm and conversational while your heart is beating, and you know that you really can’t screw up, is more difficult than knowing you can record over again.”

He said the anchors did a good job bouncing off of each other whenever someone ran out of words, started to talk too fast or got too uptight.

Since the production was a pre-game show, Asaf said he focused on statistics more than usual. 

“For a show before the national championship, people don’t really want to hear your opinion as much. They want to hear the facts behind each team and why your opinion has been formed,” he said.

But he also said it’s important to stay flexible because it was a live show.

“You have to be ready for anything,” he said. “The flow of conversation might go away from the points that you’re trying to make from the statistics you researched. You have to make it work with the people that are on the desk with you instead of relying so much on the research that you’ve done and those thoughts that you’ve been practicing over and over in your head.”

Hughes said he included broad topics in his show notes, instead of any individual words, to make the show more authentic.

“We’ve tried to really hone in on making Unscripted less scripted,” he said. “So I think that was the cool part about it, as opposed to a recorded show where you have numerous takes and you can go back and kind of do it again.”

Hughes said he hopes they do more live shows in the future because it shows how far Unscripted has come. 

“We’ve kind of made it, not just a community, but – as Emil says – just friends talking about sports,” he said. “I feel like we’ve really turned the page this school year, and I feel like the live show is just a true testament of that.”

Love said interested TCU students don’t have to be journalism or sports broadcasting majors to join Unscripted. 

“Madison [Machen] is a great example on our crew, who’s a business major. She doesn’t even do journalism, but she’s come and she participates. And she puts out great stuff,” he said.

Job postings for Unscripted are available on Handshake. Anyone interested in joining can reach out to [email protected] for more information.