Big West Hopes for Rebound

At the last Big West Conference tournament game played in the Anaheim Convention Center, Fullerton, a third-place team that 1981-82 season, put a scare into regular-season champion Fresno State. A standing-room only crowd of 7,433, mostly wearing Fresno red, hung on every possession and, afterward, celebrated well into the morning at local motels.

Compare that to the depressing scene at the Big West Conference tournament in Reno last March, when there were more than 8,000 empty seats in an 11,200-seat arena.

The steady decline in a conference that showed so much promise can be attributed to one sport . . . football.

As the Big West tournament returns to the Anaheim Convention Center this week, the conference is also attempting to return to its roots as a West Coast basketball force. That means dropping football, which weighed the conference down in recent years, nearly pulling it under.

Next season, UC Riverside and Cal State Northridge join the Big West, making a 10-team conference with eight schools in California, a geographic departure from past expansions.

“We want to be a top-10 basketball conference,” Big West Commissioner Dennis Farrell said. “We want to get multiple teams in the NCAA tournament. We want to create an exciting atmosphere. The real irony is that to do that, we have had to come full circle.”

Rapid expansion east, driven by football, was good for a time. Nevada Las Vegas was brought in, along with New Mexico State. The conference changed its name from the Pacific Coast Athletic Assn. to sound better on television, moved its tournament to bigger arenas and sought national status.

Instead, the conference lost its identity, and then it lost schools.

The exodus began in 1992 with Fresno State, followed by UNLV in 1995 and San Jose State in 1996. Conference officials scrounged up football-playing replacements, like North Texas, giving the conference a Big West of the Mississippi look.

Now, as officials grope to regain the conference’s former identity, the question is whether that is possible.

“I believe the Big West is positioned the best it has been since I have been a part of it,” Long Beach State President Robert C. Maxson said. “I have been in this conference for 17 years and have never felt more comfortable with the conference.”

There was a time when Big West basketball teams were dangerous and conference games popular.

Long Beach State, coached by Jerry Tarkanian, nearly ended UCLA’s NCAA title runs in 1971, losing a two-point game in the West Regional final. Fullerton made a miraculous run through the 1978 NCAA tournament, coming within a basket of reaching the Final Four.

In 1979, Fullerton beat Long Beach in overtime at the Long Beach Arena before 10,737 fans, only 3,000 less than UCLA and USC drew on the same night.

“I think the rivalry between Long Beach and Fullerton had surpassed even that of UCLA and USC,” former Fullerton Coach Bobby Dye said. “Just because of the intensity that was there. The whole conference was like that.”

Things have changed considerably. The Big West’s last NCAA tournament victory was in 1993. When Fullerton and Long Beach played at Titan Gym in the 1999-2000 season, an announced crowd of 1,950 showed up. And that was Fullerton’s season-high in attendance.

The problem? While basketball brought success, and some respect, football dominated the conference’s decision-making. Even bringing in UNLV, which won the national basketball title in 1991 and accounted for 23 of the conference’s 37 NCAA tournament victories, was a football decision.

“Our members felt it was important to bring Division I football programs into the conference,” said Lew Cryer, the Big West commissioner from 1978-87.

But the expense of football eventually forced some schools--including Fullerton, Long Beach and Pacific--to stop fielding teams. Other schools committed to the sport--including Fresno State, San Jose State and UNLV--relocated.

“We were drawing 33,000 to 34,000 fans to our home games,” said former Fresno State Athletic Director Gary Cunningham, who is back in the Big West as the athletic director at UC Santa Barbara. “We would go play at Fullerton or Long Beach and there would be 2,500 people in the stands. We felt our program deserved bigger audiences.”

Two “replacement” schools didn’t stay long. Nevada left for the WAC after last season and Boise State jumps to the WAC in the fall.

“We had football schools using us like a bus stop to move on to other conferences,” Farrell said.

The problem was easy to ignore while UNLV was a national power in basketball.

“That was the biggest recruiting thing we had,” former UC Irvine Coach Bill Mulligan said. “We could tell kids we were in the same conference as UNLV and played them twice a season.”

Conference officials sought a larger venue for their basketball tournament and moved it from Anaheim to the Forum.

“Basketball was really booming,” Cryer said. “You have to remember who was coaching at that time. Tex Winter was at Long Beach, Mulligan was at Irvine, [George] McQuarn was at Fullerton and Boyd Grant was having great success at Fresno. And, of course, Tark is Tark.”

And, of course, the conference tournament became more or less a UNLV coronation. The Rebels won the tournament seven times in nine seasons, from 1983 through 1991.

UNLV crowds buoyed attendance at the tournament and other schools road Rebel coat tails. Santa Barbara, New Mexico State and Utah State received at-large bids into the NCAA tournament in part because of UNLV’s success.

Last season, the conference had more teams put on NCAA probation--New Mexico State and Fullerton--than were put in the NCAA tournament, Utah State.

Support for football officially faded last fall, when the Big West held its last season.

“The simple fact was, as much as we tried, we could not support football,” Cryer said. “Why keep trying to pump up that balloon?”

Retrenching won’t be easy, but the non-football playing schools acquired a 6-5 voting edge last year, when Nevada announced it was leaving.

“Those schools stepped up and said ‘We’ve got an identity crisis here,’ ” Farrell said, adding that the next step became clear: “We needed to go in a different direction.”