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How great is this story? Here's to Bill Raftery and CBS Sports..
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Bill Raftery sings of onions and nylons, sweet kisses and lingerie, small change and nickel-and-dimers. The CBS and ESPN college basketball analyst’s big fellas take it to the tin and his little guys have big tickers. His puppies get set, get organized and get off the bus. He says that Chiclets must be counted and bounce passes may lead to ecstasy.

“As well as I know and respect Bill, he still surprises me,” said Verne Lundquist, Raftery’s CBS partner, “which gives us a kind of verve.”

Raftery stunned Lundquist a bit when Siena’s Ronald Moore sank the winning 3-pointer late in the second overtime against Ohio State in the first round of the N.C.A.A. men’s basketball tournament. “Oh, onions! Double order!” he said, shouting.

“It’s the first time we ever had a double order of onions,” Lundquist said, and then noted Raftery’s verbal excursions during the first and second rounds: “We had ‘swirling lingerie,’ ‘Lauderdale in the sunshine’ and ‘a bazaar for Harper.’ ”

Raftery said the Book of Bill started as one spontaneous utterance after another, a series of quick reactions that spiced his sharp, swiftly delivered analysis.

The term bank shot just didn’t grab him. “But if a player shows a soft touch off the backboard, it’s a kiss,” he said.

Now consider his lingerie line. “To me, jockstrap is offensive,” he said. “It’s harsh. So lingerie is how I say someone was faked out of his jockstrap.”

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Consider his onions, too. He recognizes that some view the reference as testicular, and he doesn’t deny it. But he said his were metaphorical onions. “It means something about a kid’s makeup,” he said. “I admire these kids down the stretch, the whole world on their shoulders and how they can reach back.”

When he doubled the onions for Moore, he said, “it was a reaction to him, to his size, his body weight, how tough he is, and that he proved to the world they’re more than little Siena.”

Twenty-seven years after coaching at Seton Hall, he succeeds by citing himself (Ibid., Raftery, Wm.) while occasionally spinning off new products. He hasn’t sold a line of sweet onions, endorsed Hershey’s Kisses or created a Web site.

“It’s laziness,” he said, explaining his failure to market himself.

Raftery, who will be in Boston with Lundquist on Thursday for the Xavier-Pittsburgh and Duke-Villanova games, has developed into a top-tier analyst.

“Everyone knows he’s very funny and entertaining, but they don’t credit him for being a great tactician,” Bob Mansbach, Raftery’s producer at CBS Sports, said.

And his admiration for young players — they all seem to be his children — is evident. For example, after Siena’s Kenny Hasbrouck missed one free throw, then made the second, to tie the score against Ohio State, he said: “Way to stick it. You’ve got to root for the kid.”

Probably his best-known call came 21 years ago when Pitt’s Jerome Lane obliterated the backboard on a spectacular jam.

“Send it in, Jerome!” he said, shouting.

Late this season, Lane approached Raftery before a Pitt-Connecticut game. “With a big smile,” Lundquist said, “he said, ‘Thanks for making me famous.’ ” Raftery said, “It was the cutest thing, and the psychic reward for getting to know a kid a little bit.”

Raftery, 65, and his wife, Joan, have three daughters, Kelli, Christi and Suzi; one son, Billy; and two grandchildren, Will and Alex. The children’s nicknames, bestowed by their father, are, in order: Boomer, Skinny, Boozy and Looie (for Carnesecca).

When Raftery coached at Seton Hall, from 1970 to 1982, Kelli Raftery said that misbehaving players would be punished by having to tend to the Raftery children.

“Instead of suicide drills,” she said, “we had some unusual baby sitters.”

Raftery said: “I’m sure it was a violation. I’d make them run and baby-sit.”

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Kelli, a publicist for Sports Illustrated, said her father has not confined his phrasemaking to television. In backyard basketball games, Raftery told all four of his children to “get your puppies set” before shooting.

And if he did not like the boyfriends that his daughters brought to the house, Kelli said, “He’d say, ‘Come on, he has no onions.’ ”

Raftery could not recall going negative on the onions.

And just as his analysis frequently gives him the last word before a commercial break, he has sneaked in last-second wedding-day counsel to Suzi’s and Christi’s husbands.

His wedding-day advice to Christi’s husband, Nick Wood — “She’s yours, shoes and all” — emanated from the “shoe fetish she’s had since she was a little girl — like Imelda.”

Raftery’s own predilection, and an enduring part of his on-air persona, is to deride his success as a coach even if his 154-141 record at Seton Hall is far from shameful.

But, he said: “When I was supposed to be good, I wasn’t good enough. I’m not John Wooden.”

His more successful successor at Seton Hall, P. J. Carlesimo, figures in family lore, which is replete with tales about the white-haired Raftery.

“P. J. was scouting Seton Hall one day when he was coaching Wagner,” Kelli Raftery said. “My dad was so excited that he won that he left my mother there and had to call someone at the school to ask P. J. to bring my mom to the restaurant.”