Pac-10 Tournament Disciples Hope For Conversions
It only took about 20 years, but this week the presidents of the Big Ten Conference mustered the nerve to stare down their house jinni, Bob Knight, and authorize a postseason basketball tournament.
That should be enough to allow Bob carte blanche for any and all conniptions from now until retirement.
It may also be enough to goose the Pacific-10 Conference into reviving its own postseason party.
If you missed the obit, it died a quiet - and at the time unmourned - death on March 11, 1990, in the company of close friends at the University Athletic Center in Tempe. Arizona scorched UCLA 94-78 in the trophy dash. Regular-season champion Oregon State was the obligatory first-round sacrifice. The tournament MVPs were the legendary Jud Buechler and Matt Muehlebach (from the lyric, “Let’s go to Muehlebach, Texas, with Waylon and Willie and the boys … “.) Average per-session attendance was 7,210 - a good night’s gate at St. Bonaventure but a bad one at Weber State.
So … remind us why this is a good idea?
“Because it’s the culmination of everything the kids at our schools playing the game do,” said Washington State athletic director Rick Dickson. “Everything about the sport, how it’s promoted and publicized, is focused toward that idea of March Madness - and a conference tournament is at the very heart of that.”
He’s right, you know.
And besides, there’s nothing mad about the money.
Dickson is, as you can see, an advocate of a tournament, an impulse he’s had to suppress as chairman of a Pac-10 committee instructed to determine the best format for a postseason event - but only should the league’s presidents and chancellors decide they want one. What the committee has come up with is an eight-team tournament for both men and women over a three-day period at a common site, not to begin until 1999.
By the way, that common site could be Spokane - though probably over Lute Olson’s dead body. In any case, the Arena will be invited to bid on the tournament, along with Key Arena in Seattle, America West in Phoenix, the Pond in Anaheim, the Rose Garden in Portland and the new barn in San Jose.
Providing, that is, there is a tournament.
The CEOs of the Pac-10 have decided eight ayes will be required for revival, and while the issue has been tabled ostensibly for further research into the finances, proponents want to be quite sure they have the votes to carry the motion. Because if it goes down this time, it probably goes down for good.
That’s why the Big Ten’s decision to start a tournament is so huge.
“This leaves just us and the Ivy League without one,” said Dickson. “And the truth is, we’re not the Ivy League. We fancy ourselves commensurate with the Big Ten.”
The Big Ten, too, has its purists - notably Knight - who insist a tournament devalues the regular season and costs athletes precious class time. But there is nothing devalued about the high school system that awards virtually every school a second chance in a league tournament. As for the class time, half of the league’s members are on a road trip that final weekend of the season anyway.
Class time was given lip service when the Pac-10 pulled the plug, but more to the point were the financial reservations. By giving up a non-conference home game to make way for the tournament, schools like UCLA and Arizona were losing a $250,000 payday.
Not that the Pac-10 tournament ever lost money - not even in its worst year, not even with its indifferent marketing.
“It was never a huge money maker, but the lowest each school ever received was probably $85,000,” said Dickson. “From our research and projections, we think conservatively each school could net $150,000 to $200,000 - and the Big 12 and Big Ten are projecting $300,000 to $500,000 per school.”
But every school has a horror story. For WSU, a tournament mandated an adjusted schedule that pushed the start of the Pac-10 season into December - when school was out and next to no one saw UCLA and Arizona come through. Stanford coach Mike Montgomery still has nightmares of his plodders playing three games in 48 hours, then being shipped to the East regional and getting burned by Siena three days later.
It’s always something.
But it’s Dickson’s contention that a tournament could really be something.
“It’s a different marketplace now,” he said. “The NCAA Tournament itself is worth twice what it was in 1990. And in our league, there are venues now that didn’t exist six years ago - quality places to stage a premier event.”
And the fact is, the Pac-10 has devalued itself in the eyes of NCAA selectors by not having a tournament.
Only once - in 1995 - have more than four Pac-10 teams been among the NCAA field of 64. Eighteen-win teams have been routinely snubbed; so were the 21-win Cougars of 1992. Could a win or two in a postseason tournament make them more attractive to the NCAA committee?
“I even asked Bob Frederick (the Kansas A.D. who heads the selection panel), ‘When you’ve got all those bubble teams up on the board, are you looking at winning percentage or just wins?”’ Dickson said. “Because I can’t see us and 20 teams up there with .689 or .635 behind our names. Aren’t they going by just wins? And he said, ‘Pretty much.’ Well, Arkansas got in last year with 18 wins - but they played 32 games. And in the last two years, about 80 percent of the at-large teams played more than the 27-game maximum - either in a conference tournament or the exempt preseason tournaments.
“But every Pac-10 team, unless it’s like us this year in the Rainbow Classic, was measured by a denominator of 27, and that’s a disadvantage.”
Still, the real disadvantage is atmosphere. There is more meaningless than madness in the Pac-10’s March.
“In the ACC, the tournament isn’t really a determinant on who gets into the NCAAs,” Dickson admitted. “But it’s very much a part of the whole March mentality that feeds the excitement.”
The good news is, Pac-10 members don’t have to convince Bob Knight. They only have to convince themselves. , DataTimes The following fields overflowed: CREDIT = John Blanchette The Spokesman-Review