Ask George Mason basketball coach Jim Larranaga about the far-reaching implications of the Patriots’ improbable NCAA tournament Final Four appearance in 2006, and his favorite example involves a female fan who followed the team all the way to the altar.
The grateful woman related to Larranaga that she met her future husband at a George Mason tournament party and that the couple became closer with each of the team’s four bracket-busting victories last March.
“When you realize how our winning in the tournament can have that kind of effect on people’s lives, how do you quantify that?” Larranaga said.
Indeed, the NCAA tournament holds even the most casual sports fan in thrall for the duration of its three-week run, and success in or mere entry into “March Madness” can produce bliss for everyone associated with so-called midmajor college basketball programs such as George Mason.
This season’s pairings were announced Sunday, and the resulting buzz can be a significant boon to universities that value the prestige as much as any profit.
But for as much fun as Larranaga had recalling the unexpected benefits such as the marriage he unwittingly nudged along, he also acknowledged contributing to the rising divorce rate between athletic directors and head coaches.
Little Valparaiso of the Mid-Continent Conference and slightly larger Gonzaga of the West Coast Conference gave Cinderella a modern-day makeover in the late 1990s, but George Mason’s deep tournament run as a No. 11 seed confirmed how much parity in college basketball has increased even since then. Consequently, patience has decreased among midmajor athletic directors who have reacted as if there is a shot clock in the boardroom when evaluating coaches.
When Illinois State bought out the final three years of coach Porter Moser’s contract for $510,000 last week, it indicated that the glossary entry for “midmajor program” might need a good edit. Indiana State, Evansville, Northern Illinois, Santa Clara and San Diego also made changes indirectly dictated by the sense of NCAA urgency created by midmajors such as George Mason and Southern Illinois.
“I think what we did make some coaches’ jobs more difficult,” Larranaga conceded. “Unfortunately, administrations and people in general see something as special as what we did and think if they can do it, why not us? We’ve raised the bar a little bit.”
They also raised their profile.
A friend of Larranaga’s who is a public relations executive told him the university enjoyed nearly $100 million worth of free publicity from those five NCAA tournament games. School officials estimate 300 to 400 more freshmen enrolled last fall, an unexpected surplus that forced the university to put up students at a hotel. Fund-raising goals went up 25 percent, to $25 million. The campus bookstore sold $800,000 worth of merchandise last March–$175,000 more than it had the previous fiscal year.
It’s about money . . . and more
The tournament jackpot isn’t necessarily all about the money, thanks to an NCAA revenue-sharing plan in use since 1989. In the words of Northern Illinois athletic director Jim Phillips, the plan “eliminated the $3 million free throw,” which put undue pressure on student-athletes.
This year the NCAA’s basketball fund will divvy up $132.6 million among the 31 Division I conferences for equitable distribution to their members, so Big Ten bottom-dweller Northwestern, say, essentially wins whenever Ohio State does.
The NCAA awards the 65 teams one unit for each tournament game they play, which this year amounts to $176,864 per unit. Each April, the NCAA distributes the money to conferences based on their teams’ performance over a rolling six-year period.
But the allure of the intangible payoff beyond NCAA guarantees, such as what George Mason experienced, has driven more athletic directors and university presidents into making hard decisions more quickly than they might have five or 10 years ago.
“In my view, [inclusion] in the tournament is invaluable, and you can’t measure it in quantifiable terms,” said Phillips, who agonized before firing popular coach Rob Judson on Saturday. “It affects so many aspects of your operation–not just athletics, but the entire university at a place like Northern Illinois.”
In the same way George Mason altered the perception of those kinds of schools, it changed the complexion of the coaching profession. Division I coaches worried this was coming, so much so that at their 2006 convention they seriously discussed proposals to expand the NCAA tournament from 65 teams to 96 or even 128, largely to reduce the number of coaches having to explain why they had been left out of the field.
Coaches pay the price
The spate of dismissals over the last few weeks only confirmed those fears. Besides Illinois State, Georgia State dumped Michael Perry with two years left on his contract. Royce Waltman is the only coach to lead Indiana State to the tournament since the Larry Bird years, but the school handled his firing so clumsily that Waltman criticized his former bosses for having “the deft touch of a 20-mule team.”
Out west, Santa Clara gently nudged Mr. Nice Guy Dick Davey into retirement after 15 seasons of distinction, while San Diego bought out the final year of Brad Holland’s contract after 13 seasons because an 18-14 record in 2006-07 just wasn’t good enough.
“It’s a little frightening and the only thing I don’t like about the tournament,” said Loyola coach Jim Whitesell, whose Ramblers flirted with an NCAA bid this season but were left out. “The emphasis on it is so strong, if you don’t get in, some guys are getting pushed out the door. It seems like it’s made coaches like comic-book characters, but they’re guys with families and lives.”
The reality of today’s new college basketball culture greets Missouri Valley Conference Commissioner Doug Elgin every morning when he walks into his office in St. Louis. The framed photo of Northwestern State player Jermaine Wallace hitting the shot to beat Iowa at the buzzer in the first round of last year’s NCAA tournament is a snapshot every midlevel program in America wants.
“Half the fans in the country can’t tell you what state Northwestern State is in, and that’s the symbolic beauty of the NCAA tournament,” Elgin said.
Coaches in Elgin’s conference have almost become victims of the Missouri Valley’s uncanny success on a national scale. If Southern Illinois can become a Top 20 program by spending $1.19 million annually on men’s basketball, according to an NCAA Gender Equity in Athletics filing–for comparison’s sake, Duke has an $8.1 million men’s basketball budget–why can’t Illinois State or Evansville get a similar return on its investment?
“That’s certainly the message sent,” Elgin said of his league’s three firings this month. “Those ADs are eager to get their programs from the middle of the pack to the upper division. I would like to think the Missouri Valley had an impact on changing the perception of teams and leagues like ours.”
The lesson of Valpo
Surely the MVC did. But the contemporary shift in expectations started in 1998 when Homer Drew and Valparaiso became such NCAA tournament darlings that nobody mispronounced the school’s name by the end of March.
Everybody remembers the buzzer-beater by Drew’s son Bryce, a former Bull, that stunned Mississippi State in the first round. But people often forget how that Crusaders team provided the template for schools that size to compete against teams from power conferences that had begun losing elite players to the NBA at higher rates.
“We had seniors and juniors who had played three and four years together, and that can make a difference against more talented teams relying on freshmen and sophomores,” Homer Drew said. “We were experienced, we were focused and we used that to our advantage.”
A year after Valparaiso’s storybook season, Gonzaga used the same formula to give America a geography lesson by making Spokane, Wash., a bigger dot on the college basketball map with an Elite Eight appearance. The Zags returned to the Sweet 16 in 2000 and have since built a new arena and made so many national television appearances that it’s hard to consider them a midmajor anymore.
“It doesn’t seem it was [nine] years ago when all that started to change,” Drew said. “People started saying, `If Valpo can do it and Gonzaga can do it, we can do it too.’ And they’re right. It all starts with a belief.”
They believe on the small campus of Southern Illinois-Edwardsville, where the board of trustees has approved plans to take the athletic leap of faith to Division I over the next five years. A piece of the NCAA pie is too enticing not to want one.
Even before the move was official, athletic director Brad Hewitt linked excitement over the switch with two separate $1 million gifts from donors and an increase in student applications by 600.
Hewitt and school officials studied the example of Wright State, which competed in Division II until moving up in 1987. The jubilation Wright State showed Sunday when its name popped up on TV as one of the field of 65 is what Hewitt envisions for coach Marty Simmons’ program one day.
“They’re [several] years ahead of us, but we’re making a long-term investment into the future of this university, and we’re going to be patient and hang on to our value system,” Hewitt said.
The trickle-down effect of unheralded teams making noise in the NCAA tournament has made SIU-Edwardsville’s feelings a popular sentiment around the country. Call it the Cinderella Syndrome: This year, 11 similar programs were seeking Division I status while playing an independent schedule until they find a conference home.
Indiana-Purdue-Ft. Wayne, which started its transformation to a Division I program six years ago, will join the Mid-Continent Conference next season. Coach Dane Fife called the Mastodons 12-17 record “a miracle, relatively speaking.”
But Fife, a former Indiana player, understands and accepts that given the potential rewards derived from making the NCAA field, not even the IPFWs of the college basketball world can tolerate too many 12-17 seasons.
“What’s happened with teams like George Mason and the Missouri Valley has certainly put more pressure on coaches like myself, but we just look at it as another hurdle,” Fife said. “It’s become much more difficult from a coaching standpoint. Expectations at midmajors are coming close to what they are at high majors, and I don’t know that that’s realistic. But everyone thinks they can be the next one to do it.”
To coaches such as Larranaga, that can be the best thing about the NCAA tournament. To others out of a job, it has become the worst.
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dhaugh@tribune.com
