Play-In Game No Great Prize in Some Minds

All of the floor decals and banners couldn’t hide the downside to the NCAA tournament’s opening game--Winthrop and Northwestern State would rather not be in it.

The three-time Big South champion and the Southland Conference representative from Natchitoches, La.--the backdrop for “Steel Magnolias”--arrived Monday to prepare for a play-in game they both dreaded. Both brought 18-12 records.

The winner of tonight’s tournament opener gets to face top-seeded Illinois only three days later in a Midwest regional first-round game. The loser gets the consolation of knowing it appeared in the NCAA tournament.

It’s not much consolation.

“We felt like we shouldn’t have been in this game, but there’s nothing we can do about it,” Winthrop forward Derrick Knox said.

No matter how the NCAA dressed it up, it was the game that no one wanted to play. Faced with a shrinking number of at-large bids, the NCAA decided to expand the tournament to 65 teams this year.

The two worst teams in the draw--Nos. 64 and 65--were matched in a play-in game that only had some of the trappings and a fraction of the anticipation for a regular NCAA tournament game.

NCAA logos decorated the court and an “Opening Round” banner hung from the scorer’s table for the teams’ workouts Monday night. About 6,000 tickets had been sold, roughly half the capacity of University of Dayton arena.

Instead of being featured on a CBS telecast, the game will be relegated to TNN and its 86 million cable and satellite subscribers.

“I don’t think our kids are very happy about being the 65th team in the nation,” Winthrop Coach Gregg Marshall said. “The good news is there are 254 other teams that would love to trade places with us.”

It’s not the first time the NCAA has expanded the field from 64. In 1991, six teams that got automatic bids held play-in games to join the other 61 teams.

The NCAA returned to a play-in format this year because the Western Athletic Conference and the Mountain West got automatic bids. The NCAA wants to keep 34 at-large bids, but now has 31 automatic conference bids to hand out.

The difficult part was deciding which two teams would have to put up with the disadvantages of last-minute travel and an extra game only three days before facing a top-seeded team.

Winthrop has an RPI of 188, worst in the 65-team field. Northwestern State has the third-worst at 169; North Carolina Greensboro is at 177.

Northwestern State lost to Arkansas by 68 points in December and was 11-11 on Feb. 15.