Fans Would Notice How Much Pac-10 Tourney Could Offer

We spend the day with Visine and caffeine, in front of the television watching Championship Week on ESPN. Some teams are falling off the bubble; others are climbing back on.

Digger and Dickie V are talking about RPIs and worrying which conferences are flexing their muscles and which have atrophied. If you believe Dick Vitale, 150 teams will be in the 64-team field. Every conference seems to have five, six, even seven locks.

Beginning at 9 a.m. we watch this alphabet soup of hoops. UAB and UNC-Charlotte, LSU and UNLV. Big East and Big West. The ACC and the SEC.

But none of this blur prepared us for what we saw in person Thursday night.

The best game in the country was seen by almost none of the country. If you weren’t among the 7,836 in Edmundson Pavilion, you didn’t see UCLA and Washington play the game up-and-down, toe-to-toe for 40 frenzied minutes. The best game of this eye-glazing day of TV hoops wasn’t televised because this is Championship Week, a week devoted to conference tournaments.

Because of a lack of foresight and because Arizona coach Lute Olson and Stanford’s Mike Montgomery don’t want it, the Pac-10 has no conference tournament.

It tried one from 1987 to 1990, but the league was down and the tournament was poorly promoted. Now the league is better, and Seattle, Portland, Phoenix and San Jose have glittery new arenas that could house the event.

“A tournament would be good for the entire conference,” UCLA coach Steve Lavin said after his team’s 87-85 victory over Washington. “It keeps the excitement and passion alive.”

If the Pac-10 had a tournament, a game like last night’s would have been televised. The rest of the nation, not to mention the rest of Seattle, would have seen the Huskies ride what Lavin called “their Super Bowl intensity, their magic level” to a 47-31 first-half lead.

The nation would have witnessed Jamie Booker’s relentlessness and big Todd MacCulloch’s soft-handed smorgasbord of shots around the basket.

We watched Villanova, Pitt, Georgia Tech, and UMass on television. Even Hawaii and New Mexico got into the act. UCLA and Washington deserved a look.

“We miss out on Championship Week as far as exposure is concerned,” Lavin said. “Back East, people don’t see us.”

Washington and UCLA didn’t play a perfect game. At times it was frantic and turnover-ridden. But the nation missed this celebration of youthful exuberance. It missed UCLA’s calm, poised comeback. UCLA has won three consecutive Pac-10 championships because it has the talent to overcome these rushes of emotion on foreign courts.

In the din of Hec Ed - as loud as it has been since the days of Detlef Schrempf and Chris Welp - Charles O’Bannon had the game of his life, scoring 31 points.

He had six points in an 11-0 run late in the first half. He nailed a three from deep in the corner that gave UCLA a 70-66 lead with 8:47 left. And he took Donald Watts off the dribble in a whirling drive to the hoop that put UCLA up 81-78 with 1:42 left.

This game, like the Huskies’ loss to Cal, shows there still is work to be done at Washington. The Huskies, at 16-10, aren’t ready for the NCAA Tournament.

But you only have to think back to four seasons ago to know how far this program has come. This team beat Arizona and Stanford and Oregon. It showed it could play with Cincinnati and California and UCLA.

“They’re going to be a monster next year,” Lavin said.

If the Pac-10 had a tournament, maybe these NIT-bound Huskies could have pulled an upset or two and sneaked into the big tournament. That’s part of the magic of Championship Week.

But again next year, because there is no conference tournament, Washington will be an afterthought during Championship Week.

A game this good will get lost in the world of Visine and caffeine.