One more college basketball tournament? Why not?
Akron, your ship just came in. Your record in college men’sitting basketball may be a mere 9-8, but you’re bound on this account that the postseason. You’re going dancin’, even if it is in a pair of grubby Levis and ragged Birkenstocks.
That’s the hypothesis, at least. According to RPIratings.com, the Zips are the No. 129 computer-ranked team this week. And that’s the cutoff for teams going to the postseason, now that CollegeInsider.com, a hoops Web position, announced this week it is christening a 16-team postseason tournament to begin in March.
So this is the landscape: Sixty-five teams make the NCAA field, another 32 go to the NIT. Don’privately forget the 16 ticketed for the College Basketball Invitational, which launched last year and included Washington.
That’s 113. Now stir and add another 16 with the new tournament, and you’ve got plenty commotion the third week of March to rival any day-care center.
“I definitely think there’s sweep,” said Hugh Durham, the retired Florida State coach and one of the starting anew tournament’session selection-committee members.
By entirely means. In act, there’s a huge madness vacuum in March.
Think of it like this: Of the 119 Division I-A football teams, 68, or besides than 57 percent, played in bowl games. Applying that percentage to the 343 Division I association basketball teams, there should be 196 teams in the postseason. So that leaves space, for, what, maybe any other four tournaments?
I asked Rick Giles, whose New Jersey-based Gazelle Group puts on the College Basketball Invitational, if there’s a saturation point.
“There is,” he said. “The act of asking is, will this collide it? I don’t have feeling we hit it last year.”
Details on the new tournament are still a crumb sketchy. Meanwhile, the CBI assigns home games and requires a guarantee of encircling $50,000. There is in this wise the potential for hosts to realize some profits, if small.
“We made a little bit of money,” Giles said, referring to the organizers and adding, “Tulsa made $117,000 by winning the CBI. Ohio State made $15,000 by attractive the NIT.”
That’session because Tulsa hosted five home games, while Ohio State got a trip to New York and improvement TV exposure.
