It’s Madness to Forgo Pac-10 Tournament

It’s conference tournament time in college basketball. The squall before the storm. Things don’t get any crazier than the intra-conference battles waged across the land this week. As a prelude to the NCAA tournament, the appetizers sometimes come out better than the main course.

And once again, the Pacific 10 is missing out.

I’ll watch any conference as long as it’s a tournament. It hurts not to be able to watch the Pac-10.

The other day, I turned on the TV and saw two schools identified as ULA and USA. I couldn’t locate ULA and USA even if I had a GPS.

But I watched because it was a conference tournament. These games always seem to come down to the last possession. For one thing, the disparity from top to bottom of a conference often isn’t as great as the difference between the major powers and the lower-seeded teams that meet in the first round of the NCAA tournament.

And in a conference tournament the teams are usually playing for the third time that season. By then, they know each other so well, they can call out each other’s plays. And both sides are playing with desperation, hoping to grab that automatic bid to the NCAA.

It turned out that ULA was the University of Louisiana Lafayette (formerly known as Southwestern Louisiana, still known by the best nickname in sports: the Ragin’ Cajuns). Louisiana Lafayette beat South Alabama on a jumper by Lonnie Thomas with 3.5 seconds remaining to take the Sun Belt conference’s ticket to the NCAA.

Just another great finish to a conference tournament. And another reason to wish the Pac-10 had moments like it.

The Pac-10 tried a conference tournament from 1987-1990, with lukewarm results. Attendance was so-so. Only 8,000 turned out for the final between UCLA and Arizona in 1990.

It still was profitable.

“One of the misconceptions is that the tournament wasn’t a moneymaker, which is not true,” said Jim Muldoon, Pac-10 assistant commissioner for public relations. “The tournament never lost money. It didn’t make money hand over fist, but the last year it netted $873,000 after expenses, after paying each team’s travel.”

That’s a check for $87,000 to each school. The problem is, schools such as UCLA and Arizona can make more than that with one home game, a home game they would have to give up to accommodate the addition of the tournament.

That’s one of the reasons UCLA, Arizona and Stanford are opposed to a conference tournament. All it would take to get the eight votes necessary to ratify a tournament would be for one of them to see the light.

They also cite missed class time. Class time is always a convenient excuse when schools don’t want to do something. The same schools opposed to adding so much as one extra week of football to install a true playoff are often the ones who keep their team on the road the entire month of March during the NCAA tournament.

The league is seriously considering adding a women’s basketball tournament during the next round of meetings in June. Don’t women have classes too?

The Big Ten came around and added a conference tournament, leaving the Pac-10 and the Ivy League as the only holdouts.

(The Ivy League doesn’t need a conference tournament. Just go ahead and put Princeton in the NCAA mix every year and watch the Tigers scare the heck out of some high-seeded team.)

Some said the spread-out Pac-10 will always keep attendance down, that people from Oregon and Washington won’t always make the trek to Los Angeles and Arizona, where the first four tournaments were held.

Why not try the Bay Area, which is a little more centrally located. If the New Arena in Oakland was good enough for the NBA All-Star game last month, it ought to work for a Pac-10 tournament.

Another argument trotted out against the conference tournament is that since the best teams are likely to win, it wears them out by forcing them to play three games in a short period of time right before the NCAA tournament.

That’s one of those things that can be used in whatever direction is most convenient. In college football, when a team wins after a bye weekend, it’s because of the extra preparation and rest. When it loses it’s because it got rusty from the inactivity.

Some teams like to come into the tournament on a roll. Take Georgetown in the 1980s. In the five years in which the Hoyas won the Big East tournament--1982, ‘84, ‘85, ’87 and ‘89--they advanced to at least the regional finals and made three trips to the Final Four. In the five other years, they made it as far as the Sweet 16 only once.

The important thing is, it gives every team a chance. USC kept playing hard this season, even after Sam Clancy and Jarvis Turner were sidelined because of injuries. Now that Clancy is back, the Trojans deserve a chance to make a run at the NCAA tournament with their top scoring threat in the lineup.

Could UCLA beat Arizona now that Jaron Rush is back from his suspension? Wouldn’t it be fun to at least get a chance to find out?

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J.A. Adande can be reached at his e-mail address: j.a.adande@latimes.com.