BRING HOME THE BACON

Years of gentle nudging, lobbying and pleading--lots of pleading--have paid off for persistent Big Ten Conference leaders.

The conference’s basketball coaches voted last April to endorse a plan for a postseason conference tournament, accepting the reality of college hoops in the ‘90s. The first Big Ten tournament tips off next season, meaning the conference will finally grab a piece of what has become a very juicy pie.

“The majority of our coaches, especially our veteran coaches, were opposed to the idea for some time,” Big Ten Commissioner Jim Delany said. “Are we happy that there is now support for the tournament? We sure are.”

For administrators and athletic directors, a tournament is an extra way to make money and increase national exposure. For coaches, a conference tournament is one more reason to reach for the antacid pills while reflecting on job security. And for players and fans, it signals the beginning of March Madness.

By Sunday night, 27 tournament champions will have earned their conferences’ automatic NCAA tournament berths.

“This is what it’s all about,” said guard James Cotton of Long Beach State, which begins play Friday in the Big West tournament in Reno.

“This is the greatest time of the year, when everybody is playing hard and playing together. Yeah, you want to play well during your regular season, but you want to play your best in your conference tournament. The conference tournaments mean a lot to the players.”

Every conference is on the bus except the Pacific 10 and Ivy League. The Pac-10 had a tournament in the late ‘80s but dropped it because of scheduling problems and dwindling interest.

Big East Commissioner Mike Tranghese said the positive impact of his conference’s tournament has been incalculable.

“It’s really the cornerstone of everything we do, basketball-wise,” Tranghese said. “There are a lot of positive factors that have helped make the Big East what it is, but the tournament has just had such an overwhelming impact on our success.”

The Pac-10 may soon rejoin the parade. It is considering reinstating its tournament, which was discontinued after four seasons in 1990.

Pac-10 Commissioner Thomas Hansen recently appointed a committee to review the matter.

“It’s not lost on us that now we’re only one of two conferences that doesn’t have a postseason tournament,” he said. “This is something we’re thinking about.”

Even the staid Ivy League has kicked the idea around. Ivy administrators said they recently broached the subject with the league’s presidents, who weren’t interested. Right now, anyway.

The Atlantic Coast Conference tournament sets the standard. The ACC tournament, which begins Thursday at Greensboro, N.C., is one of the oldest, having started in 1954.

Each ACC school will receive about $400,000 from this season’s tournament. And at one time, the tournament generated almost 75% of the conference’s revenue, an ACC official said.

ACC old-timers love to tell about a woman who was going to divorce her husband until her lawyer explained that she might not retain possession of the couple’s ACC tournament tickets.

So much for the divorce plans.

“You hear those kinds of stories all the time,” said Marvin “Skeeter” Francis, a former ACC tournament manager. “It’s such a great event in that it means so much to the people here. It’s not just a basketball tournament to us, it’s much more.”

To Greensboro, the ACC tournament is a boon to the local economy. The Greensboro Convention and Visitors Bureau estimates the tournament will bring $11.5 million to the area.

“And it’s not just the hotels, the airports and the rental cars--the traditional places where you think people would spend money,” said Gail Murphy, director of marketing for the bureau. “It’s also the caterers for the parties and the florists for flowers friends send to one another. It just spills over to the community in so many different ways.”

The Big East tournament, played at Madison Square Garden, does all right as well. Tranghese said the combination of location and media exposure has helped make the tournament more financially successful than organizers thought possible. Big East members should each receive about $250,000 in net profits from this season’s tournament, which begins today.

Big-time talent and the presence of an emerging ESPN to televise its tournament games helped the Big East rocket to national prominence in the ‘80s. A good showing in the conference tournament often acted as a launching pad to the NCAA tournament. Along the way, the Big East’s popularity--and prosperity--soared as recruits couldn’t sign up fast enough.

Televising Big East tournament games has been a staple of ESPN’s programming. The Big East and ACC tournaments are again featured during ESPN’s “Championship Week,” which started its 12th season Saturday.

ESPN will televise 36 men’s tournament games and ESPN2 will televise 21, six of them women’s. Ratings of ESPN tournament games last season improved to 1.5 from 1.4 during the regular season--a 7% increase, said ESPN spokesman Dean Diltz. Each cable ratings point represents 712,000 households.

“This is one of the focal points of our programming, not just in basketball but the entire year,” Diltz said. “It’s one of our best weeks of programming and we’ve always recognized that.”

Most conference tournaments are not as financially rewarding, however as the ACC’s or the Big East’s. The Western Athletic Conference, for instance, produces a payout of about $90,000 a school. And the Big West is considerably less at about $10,000.

Most of the inaugural Big Ten tournament’s logistics haven’t been set yet, but Delany said several corporations have already inquired about sponsorship possibilities. If everything goes according to plan, Delany said Big Ten schools can expect to net “somewhere between $250,000 to $400,000” from the tournament.

Still, not everyone is sold on conference tournaments. Especially coaches.

Many say conference tournaments put additional strains on the players. Tournaments require more games and more missed class time. Also, most coaches believe conference tournaments diminish the value of the regular season.

Utah Coach Rick Majerus isn’t a big fan.

“It’s insanity,” Majerus said. “I’m against them for any number of reasons and the foremost is academics. We take a kid out of school to accomplish what? I understand the financial argument, but what amount of money justifies hurting a kid’s grades?”

Big Ten coaches voted 9-2 to have a conference tournament. Bob Knight of Indiana and Clem Haskins of Minnesota were the dissenters.

“We continue to talk about education, but we’re turning more and more to professionalism,” said Haskins, whose second-ranked Golden Gophers won the Big Ten title this season. “We’re not considering the kids who are missing anywhere from two to three more days of class because of [tournaments].”

Majerus is also upset because winning regular-season titles doesn’t mean as much in these tournament-happy days.

“We play over the course of 10 weeks to decide who the best team is,” Majerus said. “Then we have these tournaments and some team gets hot, knocks off the team that’s been the best over the entire season, and those guys go run around like league champs.

“The most important thing should be winning the season title. You can lose an NCAA bid and it will put a damper on your whole season. It’s just ridiculous.”

This season, Fairfield (11-18) became the 12th team to earn an NCAA tournament berth with a losing record by winning the Metro Atlantic Athletic Conference tournament championship game. And the previous two teams, both carrying the Trans American Athletic Conference banner, were a combined 22-38.

Officially, the NCAA doesn’t have an opinion on conference tournaments. However, Bill Hancock, director of the NCAA Division I men’s basketball tournament, said conference tournaments sometimes pose problems for the selection committee.

“The pairings are announced at 5:30 p.m. CST [Sunday], so the conference representatives that are decided late on weekends can make things difficult,” he said. “Obviously, an upset winner can throw things off somewhat.

“But the bottom line is that these things are here to stay. So anyone who doesn’t like them had just better learn to deal with it.”