John Blanchette: Shootout could wind up firing blanks someday

The Great Alaska Shootout started out as a November novelty, Top 25 college basketball teams duking it out in the subarctic night, the results unlikely to appear in any morning paper east of Skagway.

Then ESPN put a couple cameras on a dogsled north and soon enough the tournament became the comfortable old sweater of Thanksgiving hoops.

And now it seems to be on its way to becoming something else.

The late Great Alaska Shootout.

What’s going to kill it? Well, the Cougar Hispanic College Fund Challenge – though there are many accomplices and none bearing any malice.

The CHCFC is an interesting new outcropping on the local landscape – Washington State hosting Montana, Air Force and Mississippi Valley State in a three-day round-robin beginning Friday at the Spokane Arena. It is not a holiday tournament in the traditional sense – no playdown, no champion – but tradition in college basketball these days tends not to survive from one TV timeout to the next.

In the meantime, Gonzaga returns north to Alaska for the Shootout, in which the Zags made a nice splash six years ago, losing in the title game to Dwyane Wade and Marquette. The field includes Butler, Texas Tech, Michigan, Western Kentucky, Virginia Tech – and Eastern Washington, which has been looking forward to the trip since, oh, August. The Eagles were a late replacement after a team dropped out.

That is, after four teams dropped out – one being Wazzu.

And that’s as telling as anything – that the Cougars could plop down $50,000 to buy their way out of the Shootout and rustle up a field for an event of their own in relatively short order, given what a drama scheduling has become, while the Alaskans were having trouble keeping a field together for what once upon a time was the most prestigious of early season tournaments.

“This one, quite honestly, is losing some of its steam,” said Gonzaga coach Mark Few.

That can be seen in one area in particular: the television schedule. Only two of the 12 games in Alaska will be televised on ESPN2, never mind the mothership. Gonzaga’s opener is on ESPNU, not available on Spokane’s cable system. And several games are booked for ESPN360 – a Web site. But even that is an option only if your Internet provider carries it.

“I really enjoy Alaska,” Few said, “but I think TV eventually dictates everything. You can just look at the coverage on this one – it’s not what it was five years ago, certainly, or even two or three years ago. For those of us in the upper echelon, TV is kind of what’s most attractive about these things.”

And TV – that is to say, ESPN – is headed elsewhere. The Worldwide Leader is already invested in the Maui Invitational and events in Orlando and Anaheim.

But it’s not only television.

The “exempt” tournament – in which up to three games could count as only one against the NCAA’s scheduling limits – used to be a fairly exclusive province. The Shootout and Top of the World Classic in Alaska, Maui and the Rainbow Classic in Hawaii and a handful of others, including the Preseason NIT. The Hawaii and Alaska events were, in fact, designed to help the scheduling situation for schools – both Division I and otherwise – in those states.

Then the NCAA enacted a rule that banned teams from appearing in more than two exempt tournaments every four years. Several promoters sued, claiming restraint of trade – that the rule prevented them from luring attractive, high-ranked teams year to year. In 2003, a District judge agreed.

And the NCAA deregulated faster than you can say “MCI.”

This year there are 58 “multi-team events” – not all are tournaments – including WSU’s Spokane games. Cougar coach Tony Bennett took his team to one in Milwaukee last year, and decided it made sense to host his own when he looked at a nonconference schedule that already had four road games and a trip to Seattle.

“When everybody else is doing it,” he said, “you feel like you should.”

Bennett noted that WSU tried in previous years to get into a Hawaii tournament so guard Derrick Low could play in front of his fellow islanders – but, of course, the Cougars weren’t ranked darlings then.

But Gonzaga director of basketball operations Jerry Krause, who handles the Zags’ scheduling, is mystified why the NCAA went from “very restrictive to having no restrictions at all.” Teams can’t play in the same event twice in a four-year period, but it can play in one every year.

In theory, it’s to allow all teams the chance to play 31 regular-season games and not just an elite few.

But Krause’s concern is that the elite few will profit more than ever.

“It opens the door for the rich getting richer,” he said. “The people with huge arenas will figure it out very quickly. You bring in three times and you have a 15,000-25,000-seat arena that you fill. That’s a big payday.

“I won’t say who it is, but I had contact in the last couple of weeks with a Top 20 school and they said they’re considering pulling out of Maui to have their own. That’s Maui – one of the prestigious ones. And that’s not good for us because we’ve been able to gain entrée to the Top 20 teams through these exempt events, and obviously we want to continue that.”

Of course, Gonzaga is on ESPN’s A-list, and WSU has more cachet now, too. But in the end, more power will accrue to TV and the BCS conference powers.

“And I don’t know if they know what’s best for college basketball,” Krause said.

But that’s never stopped them before.