These days, ceiling is low in the Sky

You won’t hear it from me – how this recent roundhouse from Mother Nature is but a tickle compared to the snows and blizzards of my youth, how we wouldn’t have been given a half-day off from school much less a week for this thin quilt covering the ground, how the only snowblower we knew was a fat man with a shovel and bad wind.

I’m not going to be the guy who says that.

But I am going to be the guy who tells you Big Sky Conference basketball as played these days is but a ghost of the game I knew as a younger man.

This is probably not the proper epilogue to be tacked on to Montana State’s 64-57 victory over Eastern Washington, a taut and twisty thriller in which it was revealed once again that no matter where they finish in the standings this season, the Eagles under first-year coach Kirk Earlywine have been a revelation for their persistence in the face of some severe shortcomings.

Alas, those shortcomings – a thin bench made thinner by leading scorer Adris DeLeon’s bout with the flu, little inside muscle and nearly no margin for error – are now being even more exposed in the rigors of conference play.

“There are a lot of people who will want to make excuses for us,” Earlywine said. “We’re not going to. We can go out and win the game no matter who it might be.”

As it happens, that’s not a bad approach for the Big Sky as a collective.

It’s difficult to dispute that, Rodney Stuckey and his first-round entrée into the NBA notwithstanding, the league that gave us Dick Motta, Micheal Ray Richardson, Jud Heathcote and Gus Johnson – to say nothing of John Stroeder Look Alike Night – has fallen on some hard times.

At the least it’s settled into a strata with the Southlands and Patriots and other leagues it used to cast a disdainful look down on from above.

Earlywine, an assistant at Weber State for seven years, isn’t ready to concede the point.

“I don’t know if that’s true,” he said. “Two years ago, Montana won a game in the NCAA tournament and should have won a second. A couple years before at Weber, we were 42 in the RPI (Ratings Percentage Index). I think maybe from the old, old days when you had Boise and Nevada in the league, you had people with significantly greater resources that everybody else than the Montanas in our league have now.”

Well, yes. But that’s Exhibit A. Boise State, Nevada and Idaho have long departed, to be replaced by Sacramento State, Portland State and Northern Colorado.

Exhibit B: attendance. Even the captive audiences of burgs like Flagstaff and Pocatello are resisting the charms of Big Sky hoops. League attendance is half what it was 13 years ago.

Exhibit C: the RPI. The NCAA’s power computer pegs the Big Sky at 24th among 31 Division I conferences. That’s actually better than the Sky’s average over the past five years, but the league was once a fixture in the midteens.

Commissioner Doug Fullerton admits that he sometimes grapples with how much of his role is to set the agenda for the conference, but when the RPI dipped to 30 in the middle of the 2005 season he “decided enough was enough.

“Basketball is a special interest to me – I used to coach the game,” he said. “I thought I saw that it was not just a blip that put us at 30, it was a consistent trend downward. I’ll take a knock on it, too – it was partly due to lack of exposure and that’s my job.”

As he found the Sky a modest TV package, he laid down the law to the schools: Put together a non-conference schedule with opponents averaging 160 – that’s the 50th percentile – in the RPI or pay a fine.

“There was a lot of scraping and gnashing of teeth,” Fullerton said. “But I thought some programs had fallen into the trap of playing for 20 wins and a championship instead of competing on a bigger stage, which we used to do. I got tired of us scheduling every one of those teams making a transition to Division I. And this is second-best way to manipulate the RPI. The best way is to stop playing money games.”

Of course, Sky teams can’t do that. There still has to be lights and heat in the gym.

You could question why the Sky needs to be ambitious. After all, it’s always been a one-bid league come March Madness and that simply isn’t going to change. But if there’s no movement upward, the Sky will be perpetually saddled with 15 and 16 seconds, and those first-round wins like Montana’s in 2005 – one of just eight in the league’s history – will be even more unlikely.

There is one other issue, too. In 1982, when Idaho was the last Sky team to appear in the final AP Top 25, there were 224 Division I teams. Now there are 341. The Midwest juco gunner who used to find his way to Ogden now gets 15 offers instead of five. The Micheal Rays are identified early at AAU tournaments and the Sky never gets in the door.

“We have to find kids to make into talent,” Fullerton said. “That’s our lot in life. That doesn’t mean it can’t be done.”

It has to be. Otherwise, the Sky will keep falling. And it won’t just be snow.