Price Wasn’t Right, but Big West’s Logic Is on the Money

The assistant commissioner of the Big West Conference held out a small cardboard box and asked you to please contribute.

You could not believe Jody McRoberts was serious, but when she smiled and insisted she was, you obligingly unhooked the thin metal chain around your neck, stripped it of its neon-green press credential and dropped the chain into the box along with all the others, ready for recycling this time next year.

So, how goes life in the Big West without Nevada Las Vegas in the Big West basketball tournament?

Brother, can you spare some chains?

Scrimp and save became the buzzwords at this year’s event, because the turnstiles at Long Beach Arena stopped clicking about the same time the Runnin’ Rebels stopped dribbling. Stay home--that was the directive the Big West office gave UNLV once the NCAA declared the Rebels ineligible for postseason play in 1992.

Grudgingly, the Rebels obeyed.

Not so grudgingly, so did 10,000 or so college basketball fans.

Somewhat heroically, the Big West released an attendance figure for Sunday’s championship game between the Pride of Las Cruces, the New Mexico State Aggies, and Stockton’s Finest, the University of the Pacific Tigers. No calculator needed.

The official total: 1,631.

No, no zero is missing.

Yes, that’s more than 9,000 shy of what last year’s UNLV-Fresno State final drew--and almost 12,000 shy of the Big West record, 13,558 for UNLV-Fresno State, again, in 1984.

Add in 3,373 for Saturday night’s two semifinals and similar non-crowds for Friday’s four quarterfinals and you have the poorest attendance for a Big West tournament since the first one, inside the old Stockton “Opera House” in 1976.

Dennis Farrell, Big West associate commissioner, estimated that gross ticket receipts for the 1992 tournament would be $300,000 behind the 1991 tournament. “We’re probably down 75%,” Farrell said. “We recognized what the fiscal impact might be without Nevada Las Vegas in this tournament. But if that’s the price it takes to guarantee us a representative in the NCAA tournament, we made the right decision.”

If the price wasn’t right, the Big West’s logic was. Let UNLV in and, barring broken legs to J.R. Rider, Elmore Spencer and Evric Gray, UNLV wins. And if UNLV wins without any hope of a sub-regional ticket, the Big West very likely watches its automatic NCAA bid get flushed right out of the field.

As it was, the Big West barely qualified. New Mexico State beat Pacific, 74-73, to improve its record to 23-7 . . . and it gets the Big West’s only NCAA invitation--the No. 12 seed in the West Regional.

Translated, the NCAA regards the winningest eligible team in the Big West as a weaker entrant than South Florida (No. 11 in the West), on the same par with Southwest Missouri State (No. 12 in the Midwest) and slightly better than Southwest Louisiana (No. 13 in the West), Montana (No. 14), Eastern Illinois (No. 15) and Robert Morris (No. 16).

Take away the automatic berth and who knows? The Big West would have been been depending on an at-large bid--and you know what that got a 22-8 Cal State Long Beach team in 1990.

It got Cal State Long Beach the NIT.

And an NCAA shutout stood to cost the Big West more than pride. Also to be considered, very seriously, was NCAA tournament revenue-sharing. Every time the Big West sends a team into the NCAA playoffs, the Big West is awarded with a “unit,” which translates into dollars. Two teams, two units. No teams, no units. And with the revenue-sharing program rolling over every six years, any conference drawing a zero one year is stuck with that zero for six years.

“We’re taking our lumps at the gate this year,” Farrell said, “but we’d have been taking our lumps for the next six years if we’d have done it the other way.”

It was the right decision to make, even if the UNLV bandwagon annually runs 6,000 to 7,000 deep.

So you leave UNLV out of the tournament for one season.

What’s the worst that can happen?

Replay the 1992 Big West tournament highlights now, shall we?

The best remaining draw in the tournament, Fresno State, home to the pack-up-and-drive-anywhere Red Wave, lost in the first round.

The second-best remaining draw in the tournament, UC Santa Barbara, top-seeded and two hours to the north, also lost in the first round.

Host Long Beach lost in the second round, as did nearby UC Irvine, which kept the curiosity seekers away Sunday. By virtue of their upset over Santa Barbara, the Anteaters had become the official novelty of the tournament. Had Irvine beaten Pacific as well, the Long Beach Arena barkers would have had a field day: Come and see a 9-21 team qualify for the NCAAs!

But it was not to be. Nothing that could have conceivably bailed out the Big West was to be. For its final, the Big West got 14-16 Pacific, a school so disinterested in the affair that it failed to send cheerleaders, and New Mexico State, with its traditionally charismatic starting lineup--Five Guys Named Joe.

Neil McCarthy, the New Mexico State coach, brightened as he attempted to point out that “We brought a good share of the crowd today, about 500 or 600. I remember the first time we played in the tournament. We were playing Vegas in the finals and I looked behind my bench and there were seven people from Las Cruces. Then I looked across the arena and there were 7,000 Vegas fans staring me in the face.”

It was different Sunday.

Sunday, 7,000 empty seats stared McCarthy in the face.

Farrell tried to laugh as he considered his rotten luck during this lost weekend.

“We had some fabulous games,” he said, not incorrectly, “but we don’t have much control over who wins them. We kept hearing, ‘If Santa Barbara wins Friday, they’ll bring a couple thousand fans down. If Fresno wins, they could bring another thousand.’

“Unfortunately they didn’t win. But if those fans had shown up Friday, there’s a different atmosphere and maybe there’s a different result to those games.”

As they say, there’s always next year. In the meantime, save those bottles and cans. Do your local Division I basketball conference a favor.