Big West needs to bring basketball tourneys home
• If you happened across any of the first couple of days of the Big West men's and women's basketball “championships” on ESPN+ — by edict of the conference office, it's not considered merely a “tournament” anymore — all of those empty seats might have caught your eye. Rows and rows and rows of them . ...
• The Big West shifted its tournament to the Las Vegas area in 2021, to the arena at the Mandalay Bay resort, because pandemic restrictions made it more feasible to put the event in a bubble environment. The listed attendance for the championship game between UC Santa Barbara and UC Irvine was 17, but the move wasn't about attendance.
But Vegas has a subtle gravitational pull on the best of us. Since 2022, the tournament has been held at the Dollar Loan Center in Henderson, a 20-minute drive from the Las Vegas Strip and pretty much indicative of the Big West's place in college basketball's pecking order. It is one of five conference tournaments held in the Las Vegas area, and easily the least noticed . ...
• Consider: Listed capacity at the Dollar Loan Center, home to the Vegas Golden Knights' AHL franchise, is 5,567. The Big West hasn't come close to filling it; crowds for the men's championship games the last two seasons were 1,864 (Cal State Fullerton over Long Beach State in 2022) and 1,897 (UC Santa Barbara over Fullerton last year).
By way of comparison, Wednesday was the first day of four men's conference tournaments in southern Nevada. The Pac-12 drew an announced 10,133 for its evening session at T-Mobile Arena, the Mountain West 5,858 at UNLV, the WAC 1,064 at the Orleans Arena — and the Big West 717 in Henderson. (The West Coast Conference finished its tournament Tuesday with an announced crowd figure of 5,794 on the final night, also at Orleans Arena).
Thursday night's Big West attendance, for CSUN against Hawaii and UC Riverside against Long Beach State: 1,227 . ...
• And here's a reminder: For the previous 19 years, from 2001 through 2019, the Big West held its tournament in Anaheim, a decade at the Anaheim Convention Center and nine years at Honda Center. Yes, the crowds might have gotten swallowed up when the tournament moved to the larger venue, but they certainly drew more than The Convention Center's basketball configuration seated 7,500, which seemed perfect: Big enough to handle Big West crowds, small enough to feel intimate.
At Honda Center, championship game attendance for most of those years was in the 5,000 to 6,000 range, with a high of 7,564 in 2012 when Long Beach defeated UCSB. No, the Big West didn't come close to filling the building, and at one point they used curtains to reduce capacity, but their numbers then were close to five times what they're drawing now . ...
• Bottom line, literally: With Fullerton, Long Beach, UC Irvine, UCR and CSUN and the conference office in Irvine within easy driving distance of Anaheim (which, remember, is something of a tourist attraction as well) and Cal Poly, UCSB, Cal State Bakersfield and UC San Diego within a reasonable distance, someone needs to explain to me why the outskirts of Vegas are a better fit than the conference's own backyard.
Take your time. I'll wait . ...
• Apropos of nothing, maybe: According to the American Gaming Association, American adults are expected to legally bet a total of $2.72 billion on this year's men's and women's NCAA tournaments. And I'll be very interested to see what the breakdown of that handle will be, specifically the total wagered on the women's tournament . ...
• We can pretty much assume the USC and UCLA men won't be part of the NCAA Tournament mix. Additionally, Bruins coach Mick Cronin said a month ago he might lean against accepting an NIT bid, and Memphis' Penny Hardaway said Thursday there's
“zero chance” that his team would play in the NIT.
Given that the NCAA, which runs the NIT, changed the rules to accommodate more large conference entrants — and in effect shafted mid-major teams by removing automatic qualifier status from regular-season conference champions that didn't win their conference tournaments — there's only one appropriate reaction to big conference teams turning their backs on the secondary tournament: Serves them right . ...
• Item: Aaron Donald announces his retirement. Comment: The Hall of Fame countdown begins now . ...
• Current scalper's prices for the first game of the Dodgers' Shohei Ohtani era, the opener against San Diego on Wednesday in Seoul, are more than $3,000 a seat, or five times face value, according to a Bloomberg report. But there's a catch: On one secondary market, part of the deal is that the scalper accompanies you to the game.
This may or may not be more civilized than the guy standing along the access road to the stadium with an “Anyone got tickets” cardboard sign . ...
• Today's exercise in reader participation (i.e., you supply the punch line): According to superagent Casey Wasserman, speaking on a Bill Simmons podcast, NBC's upcoming coverage of the Paris Olympics will be less sports event and more “reality-like storytelling.” Bonus points if you can get the phrase “plausibly live” into the punch line . ...
• A six-hour difference between France and the East Coast (and nine hours between Paris and L.A., which network programmers won't really consider) might have something to do with that approach. But if the network determines this a success, we can only fear what the coverage will look like four years from now at the L.A. Olympics.
You think we on the West
Coast have had issues before with coverage that's live in the East and delayed three hours here? Just wait.