March Madness Favorite

[KeithAbb0tt]

I set up two favorites for March Madness, one for each of my favorite colleges (using the "Team Favorite" functionality). Unfortunately, the title is captured as "2026 NCAA Men's Basketball Tournament", which means I will have to set up new favorites each year. Anybody know how to set up a Team Favorite with a wildcard in the title (e.g. "*NCAA Men's Basketball Tournament"), so it would also work for future years?

[wayner9]

I am not so sure that you can do this. It comes up with other sporting events, like "2025 Stanley Cup Finals".

What about a genre of college basketball plus a keyword or your team. Would that work?

[KeithAbb0tt]

By genre, do you mean category? I'm not seeing a genre option when creating or modifying a favorite.

[wayner9]

I have been able to do this in the Web UI. I set up a favorite for Kentucky limited to 2026 NCAA Mens Basketball.

I did this by clicking on the show name in the guide grid. Then I clicked Add Favorite. It had the show name already set and I added the keyword "kentucky". See the image below. This might not work perfectly as if there are other schools with Kentucky in the name then you might get them as well. But recording too many games is not an issue.

The other thing to do is to just record all basketball games for the next month. You might have tuner issues when there are four games at once and you don't have four tuners, but then just set manual recordings to ensure you get the ones you want.

[KeithAbb0tt]

What I was really hoping to do was eliminate "2026" from the title of the favorite, so that it would work for future years as well as this year. It appears that SageTV forces you to set up a favorite from an existing show in the guide; you can't just enter (or modify) a title via keyboard. For now, I'll stick with the "Team Favorite" method, and just create new favorites for next year. Not a big deal, I was really just trying to see if someone had a slick(er) way to accomplish this.

[wayner9]

Not optimal but I would blame the guide data. We don't need the year in the show title. "NCAA Men's Basketball Tournament" is a perfectly good title. I got fucked by this last week as missed recording the first round of the TPC golf tournament as rather than having a show title of "PGA Tour Golf" like you have most weeks it was "2026 Tournament Players Championship" and didn't record.

Maybe just set a calendar notice that occurs on March 1 of every year to update your SageTV Fave for March Madness.

[KeithAbb0tt]

I am very close to figuring out a way to do this with the Sagex api. I can successfully add a favorite with a wildcard in the title using the api. There is also a parameter for supplying a person ID, which corresponds to the team name (e.g. Michigan, Michigan State). If I can figure out the person ID that corresponds to those teams, I think I can get the favorite working.

Anybody know how to get the person ID corresponding to a given person within Sage?

[LanceUMatthews]

I think I'm able to create a favorite like you want using the SageTV UI. For each team you're interested in...

1. Create a Team Favorite for that team that's not tied to a particular show.
   • If you create the favorite from Program Guide and are prompted Would you like the Team Favorite for 'Team' to apply only to shows with the title '2026 NCAA Men's Basketball Tournament'?, answer No.
2. The name of the favorite is Team. Open its details.
3. Select Add a keyword and specify TITLE:"NCAA Men's Basketball" without brackets.
4. The name of the favorite is now Team [TITLE:"NCAA Men's Basketball"].

This appears to be combining an arbitrary search query with a team favorite. Note that if you later try to edit the Keyword for that favorite the editor drops the surrounding TITLE:" and " portions and only let's you specify the query text for a title match.

[wayner9]

Good Work on this folks as this will be useful for a bunch of sports favourites. Like "[2026] Masters Tournament", whech is coming up in a few weeks, and also "Super Bowl", "NBA Finals", "Stanley Cup Finals", "Open Championship", etc.

[KeithAbb0tt]

For me, I will probably be using this mostly for playoff scenarios, where I am only interested in watching games for specific teams. For events like the Super Bowl, I'll be recording it no matter which teams are playing.

[LanceUMatthews]

Unless I am wrong, the full substring "NCAA Men's Basketball" needs to show up somewhere in the title. It will not match if the individual words are in a different order. There can be characters before or after the substring, but the substring itself must be an exact match.

Correct. TITLE:"NCAA Men's Basketball" matches that exact phrase somewhere in the title, but not necessarily the entire title. You don't have to require a phrase match, though, if you want the favorite to be less stringent; TITLE:NCAA Men's Basketball or even TITLE:Basketball Men's NCAA both match the current 2026 NCAA Men's Basketball Tournament airings.

If you wanted to match both men's and women's basketball in one favorite you could use TITLE:NCAA (M|Wom)en's Basketball ((Wo)?Men's or (Wo)*Men's won't work because ? and * are treated as wildcards, not regular expression quantifiers) or even just TITLE:NCAA Basketball.

Another approach would be instead of creating a Team Favorite to do an all-fields match on the team name with a keyword like NCAA Men's Basketball Team1. You could even match multiple teams in the same favorite with NCAA Men's Basketball (Team1|Team2|Team3). Depending on what teams you care about it might be tricky to come up with a keyword that matches no more and no less than you want in light of there being, for example, multiple schools with the same mascot or State University vs. University of State vs. State Tech.

[KeithAbb0tt]

OK, now you're just showing off. But seriously, thanks for sharing these tips.

If you wanted to match both men's and women's basketball in one favorite you could use TITLE:NCAA (M|Wom)en's Basketball ((Wo)?Men's or (Wo)*Men's won't work because ? and * are treated as wildcards, not regular expression quantifiers) or even just TITLE:NCAA Basketball.

Would TITLE:"NCAA (M|Wom)en's Basketball" work as well?

[LanceUMatthews]

Would TITLE:"NCAA (M|Wom)en's Basketball" work as well?

It does, yes.