Big Monday exposure worth little

It was either Chekhov or Mark Few who said something about there not being a Monday that wouldn’t cede its place to Tuesday. Except now Thursday’s place has been ceded to Monday.

If you don’t follow that, then follow this:

Gonzaga at Santa Clara, tonight, 9 o’clock tip.

Welcome to Big Monday.

Now, depending on your point of view, Big Monday is either a Big Deal (paste sincere emoticon here) or Big Deal (sarcastic emoticon here), a Big Bother, a Big Mistake or a Big Relief.

Relief? The game tonight’s on ESPN2, at least, and not ESPNU – the “U” standing for unholy, another way for the Worldwide Leader to hold your cable provider hostage and jack up your bill. The ESPNU game on Saturday night was a home run for sports bars in Spokane and dish mavens, but bad juju for phone answerers at Comcast and here at the old S-R, and for cable viewers who have come to expect the Zags to be guests in their living rooms on demand.

Now let’s hope those folks know in advance that they’ll be up late on Monday nights.

Big Monday, of course, is ESPN’s well-established contrivance to find programming for sport’s black-hole night – a college basketball tripleheader stretching from 7 in the evening to 2 in the morning on the East Coast. It used to be a Big East/Big Ten/Big West affair – hence the “Big” hook – until the Big 12 inherited the heartland slot and until the Big West became irrelevant. Then the Mountain West took over the late show, and we mean late – in the time zone next door, it meant 10 p.m. starts, and apparently the conference decided the exposure bang wasn’t too loud since even people who cared about Mountain West hoops were turning in before tipoff.

So now the West Coast Conference is jumping into the union, though not exactly with both feet. It’s a one-year contract, and the WCC is filling only four Mondays the next two months – with Gonzaga, to no one’s surprise and a few conference members’ dismay, appearing all four times.

But here’s the hitch: Even when the games aren’t on TV, they’ll be on Monday nights. The WCC has decided to go all-in on a Saturday-Monday schedule.

So a Portland-Loyola Marymount game that was lucky to lure 1,000 souls off the streets on a Thursday night last year will try to persuade those same folks to turn out on a Monday this year – though at least without being the TV game they can start it at a decent hour.

Lest you think the WCC schools are selling their souls for a dollar, be advised that Gonzaga athletic director Mike Roth characterized it as “an exposure decision, not a financial one.” But he acknowledged there’s some selling being done, and that the devil is in the details.

“For the league, there’s an opportunity for it being a very positive association – we’re being lumped in with a couple of high-profile basketball leagues,” Roth said. “From that standpoint, it’s difficult to turn that down. But from our standpoint, we have some concerns about Monday night.”

There’s those 9 p.m. tips – not exactly family friendly for ticket holders, or even viewers, with school-age Zags fans. There’s the restructuring of the team’s “work schedule” – instead of taking Sundays as their NCAA-mandated day off and getting away from both basketball and school, the Zags are now off on Tuesdays, but must deal with both travel (on away games) and classes. And Roth pointed out, “Monday, historically, on our campus has been one of the busiest if not the busiest for night classes – and that impacts our students.”

It’s the decreased down time that has coach Mark Few concerned, especially after consulting with his friend Ray Giacoletti at Utah, who had to deal with it a year ago.

“It’s harder on your team, no question – there’s really no days off for eight weeks,” he said.

But as critical as he’s been in the past of the WCC’s effort in marketing itself, Few doesn’t hesitate in calling it “exciting for the league, and that’s why I supported it.”

Yet he wishes that, aside from the Monday TV games, the league had stuck with the Thursday-Saturday schedule, whatever rest, practice and competitive imbalances might result.

“You heard, ‘What if you’re on the road Monday and then you have to play somebody who was at home the previous Saturday?’ ” he said. “Well, so what? Those things all tend to even out. They do that sort of thing in the ACC, they’ve done it in the Big Ten. You deal with it. It’s always, ‘What if?’ Well, what if a meteor strikes the arena? Then you don’t play. It just wouldn’t have been that hard.”

Few’s outlook may be colored by the non-conference jetting around his team has been doing this season and the Zags’ remarkable resiliency in handling it, but it’s not an unreasonable point. Changing all the games to Mondays – especially if this only turns out to be a one-year experiment – seems a little pointless.

But then, maybe the entire exercise is.

The WCC is getting four national exposures out of this – three on ESPN2, only one on the flagship. That’s exactly as many as the league had last year and in 2004 – all Gonzaga games, again, and all on the Deuce, but all at the more reasonable starting time of 8 p.m. Isn’t that a wash?

Of course, those were Gonzaga-driven deals. This is a WCC deal. It’s a political distinction, and politics is certainly a player in college athletics.

It’s also a conference deal that has bumped those two games to ESPNU, the better for the network to market its latest toy.

“It’s the way TV works,” Roth shrugged. “I’m not sure even the ACC gets to tell ESPN who’s playing. I’m sure ESPN tells the ACC who they want and when they want them.”

And for now, the Zags are wanted tonight – although it’ll be tomorrow on the East Coast. Apparently Monday has ceded its place to Tuesday after all.