ABOVE: Exclusive footage of the scene last night at WAC headquarters in Greenwood Village, in the wake of this weekend’s news that Utah State and San Jose State are probably leaving the WAC for the Mountain West, Texas-San Antonio and Louisiana Tech are probably leaving for Conference USA, and Texas State may be Sun Belt-bound.
“All hands, abandon WAC! Repeat, all hands, abandon…” [conference explodes]
If you prefer your nerdy conference realignment humor in Lord of the Rings form, I can do that, too:
ELROND: Gandalf, the enemy is moving. Conference USA’s forces are massing in the East; its eye is fixed on San Antonio and Ruston. And the Blue Aggies, you tell me, have betrayed us. Our list of allies grows thin!
GANDALF: The treachery runs deeper than you know. By foul craft, Karl Benson is breeding an army in the caverns of the Sun Belt. An army that can move in sunlight, and devour his former conference at speed. Benson is coming for Texas State.
ELROND: This evil cannot be concealed by the power of the WAC! We do not have the strength to withstand the Mountain West, Conference USA and the Sun Belt! Gandalf…the football schools cannot stay here.
In all seriousness, it appears the WAC is well and truly dead as a football conference. The only question is what happens to Idaho and New Mexico State. Either or both may well need to drop down from FBS to FCS, in which case they will probably join an FCS conference and will be done with the WAC in all sports.
If so, that would leave the once-proud WAC with just four schools, none of whom are actually members as of today: Denver, Seattle, UT-Arlington, and Boise State (in everything but football). I hate to say “I told you so,” but, well, cue my blog post from November 17, 2010, just before Hawaii announced its defection, titled “Is Denver too excited about joining the WAC?”
“The Western Athletic Conference is an iconic athletics conference associated with the West,” said DU Chancellor Robert Coombe. “We are absolutely thrilled — absolutely thrilled — to become a member of the Western Athletic Conference.”
“This is a day of celebration,” said DU’s athletic director, Peg Bradley‐Doppes. “There were some happy tears with our alums coming in. This is a day that we all envisioned. We didn’t know when it would happen, but we had the dream. The dream is now a reality.” She said joining the WAC was the culmination of a five-year “strategic plan specifically for today, for this purpose, to get into a new conference.”
The event — which you can watch here — left no doubt that Denver was overjoyed to earn a spot in the WAC, leaving behind the geographically awkward Sun Belt in favor of a more regionally appropriate, higher-profile conference. But the question must be asked: is DU’s joy out of proportion to the actual benefit of its move, at least in basketball terms? …
[After discussing the relative weakness of the then-planned WAC in basketball terms, I added…] There’s also the matter of football revenue, and even more important, potential instability in the current conference-swapping climate. Denver doesn’t play football…but DU will have to pay very close attention to football-related expansion machinations as they continue to play out over the next several years, because the WAC remains exceedingly vulnerable if things start moving again. …
[Nevertheess,] Denver wasn’t going to stay put and let the opportunity offered by the WAC — undeniably an improvement over the Sun Belt — pass it by. So they made the jump, and understandably so. Now they just have to cross their fingers that the center holds…
The center has not held, as became clear the day after I published that post, when Hawaii bolted. And now, things have gotten so bad that it’s no longer clear the WAC was, after all, “undeniably an improvement over the Sun Belt.” Here’s what Yahoo’s Dr. Saturday wrote a few minutes ago:
If the league starts to crumble, those perspective teams could back out. UT-Arlington could probably go back to the Southland Conference. Denver also might be able to return to the Sun Belt as a non-football member. Denver left the Sun Belt on good terms and has a great relationship with Benson.
That’s certainly a possibility. But are there other options? First things first: could the quartet of Denver, Seattle, UT-Arlington and Boise State possibly be the base for a viable basketball/Olympic league? Without Utah State, there is no marquee team left in that conference, nor any natural basketball rival for the up-and-coming Pios, as the Blue Aggies would have been. Bummer. But can such a horrifically watered-down WAC nevertheless survive? There has been talk of adding Utah Valley and Cal State-Bakersfield, which would bring the league up to the NCAA minimum of 6 members. Maybe another team or two, like potential Great West castaway UT-Pan American, could be added to bring the total up to 7 or 8. That’s be a terribly crappy league, but hey, Denver would at least have a really good shot at winning some NCAA Tournament autobids!
Other possibilities include Denver and Seattle finally getting long-coveted WCC invites — that would be, as it has always been, the ideal scenario for the Pioneers — or DU being among a group of WAC castaways seeking refuge in the Summit League. Or the Pios could knock on the Big Sky’s door, setting up an in-state conference rivalry with Northern Colorado — if that league is interested in non-football-playing members. But I’ve heard they aren’t.
Ultimately, if the WCC continues to say no, and assuming the Big Sky is also out, Denver will need to decide among three bad options: (1) staying in the WAC and trying to build a viable league (a path that depends on Boise State, in particular, also staying put; but then, the Broncos may not have very many other options for their non-football sports either); (2) joining the Summit League; or (3) returning, hat in hand, to the Sun Belt.
I have no idea what will happen. But we may get a better idea soon. From Doc Saturday:
The WAC — or what’s left of it — is holding meetings this week in Scottsdale, Ariz., and the main topic will be the preservation of the conference.
I hope they’ve got good alcohol at the meeting site, because those people are going to need some stiff drinks.
NIT snubs Denver; Pios’ season ends at 22-9
Despite NYC Buckets’ late change to its NIT projection, putting Denver in the field at the eleventh hour, the Pioneers were in fact left out by the NIT selection committee last night, probably doomed by the 11 teams who received automatic bids for winning their leagues’ regular-season titles (then losing in conference tourneys).
Having been rejected by the NIT, Denver appears to have turned down any overtures by the CBI and CIT, the sub-NIT “alphabet soup” tourneys run by the Gazelle Group and CollegeInsider.com, respectively. Whether that decision was made because the school didn’t want to “pay to play,” or because DU considered those tourneys beneath it, or some combination thereof, I don’t know. But in any event, Denver’s season is officially over, with a school-record 22 wins against 9 losses, but no postseason bid. Bummer.
Meanwhile, last night, a write-up of the Sun Belt title game (and semifinals), co-written by a trio of Sun Belt recappers — North Texas fan Ross Lancaster, Western Kentucky fan Cortney Basham, and myself — was published on the Mid-Majority’s 800 Games Project. It looks at the same events from our three perspectives, and is titled “Thrill of Victory, Agony of Defeat.” This morning, it was declared the winner of the 800GP’s Championship Fortnight contest, out of 135 entries, which is pretty cool. I’m really proud of the piece, which I edited into a single recap from Ross’s and Cort’s separate write-ups, adding a bit of my own perspective in the process. Although I only wrote a portion of it, I think it’s the best thing I’ve done for the 800GP this season. Anyway, here it is.
Last but not least, my 17th annual free NCAA and NIT pools are underway, over on my Living Room Times blog. A women’s NCAA pool will start up later tonight. Come fill out your brackets and join in the fun!
Denver lobbies for NIT bid
Denver head coach Joe Scott wants you, and the NIT selection committee, to know that he thinks his Pioneers are “NIT-worthy”:
It’s been suggested, by a bird whispering in my ear (or similarly ironclad sourcing), that Denver would turn down a bid to the “pay-for-play” CBI or CIT. I have no idea whether that’s actually true. But the conspicuous absence, in the above interview, of any reference to the CBI or CIT, coupled with SID/interviewer Erich Bacher’s implicit suggestion that the NIT selection committee’s decision will determine whether or not the Pios have “some more basketball in them,” could be seen as supporting this notion that the CBI and CIT are not viable options for Denver. So it may be NIT or bust.
If that’s the case, unfortunately, it’s looking increasingly like “bust,” despite the best P.R. efforts of Scott and the DU sports information department. NYC Buckets had Denver out of the field yesterday morning, and that was before last night’s loss by UT-Arlington in the Southland semifinals shrank the NIT bubble further, taking away another bid from some at-large contender like, perhaps, the Pios.
The entire #8 seed line (that’s the NIT’s bottom seed) will now be occupied by auto-bids — Bucknell, Valparaiso, Savannah State and UT-Arlington — from leagues that otherwise would not have produced an NIT team. You can throw in Middle Tennessee as well, though its seed will be higher. And there are a number of minefields left to navigate: conference tourney losses by Stony Brook (America East), Long Beach State (Big West) or Mississippi Valley State (SWAC) would definitely shrink the bubble, and losses by Akron (MAC) and Nevada (WAC) might, depending on who then wins those leagues, and what the NIT selection committee presently thinks of Buffalo/Ohio (MAC) and New Mexico State (WAC) as at-large contenders.
Bottom line, Denver right now looks fairly unlikely to make the NIT. But it’s not impossible. It all depends on how the above-listed teams (and the handful of NIT bubblers still playing) do tonight and this weekend, and then on what the selection committee thinks of the Pios.
(Hat tip: Puck Swami.)
NIT bid thievery adding up
It wasn’t a great night for NIT bubble teams, like Denver, as two NIT at-large spots disappeared due to low-major conference tourney upsets. #2-seed Lehigh upset #1-seed Bucknell in the Patriot League, and #8-seed Hampton stunned #1-seed Savannah State in the MEAC quarterfinals. That means Bucknell and Savannah State, as regular-season conference champs, will get automatic bids to the NIT.
Add in the win yesterday by #3 Detroit over #1 Valparaiso in the Horizon League, and of course the stunner in Denver’s own Sun Belt that either relegated Middle Tennessee State to the NIT or (less likely) made them an NCAA at-large and thus pushed someone else down into the NIT, and that’s four NIT spots gone.
(Tourney championships for VCU instead of Drexel, South Dakota State instead of Oral Roberts, and Loyola instead of Iona don’t matter as much, since the team that won the NCAA bid, although not a #1 seed, was likely NIT-bound anyway if they’d lost.)
On the bright side, top seeds Long Island (NEC) and Montana (Big Sky) took care of business tonight. But there are lots more opportunities for additional bid thieves to emerge. Denver and other NIT bubble teams need to root hard for the following teams over the coming days: Stony Brook (America East), Akron (MAC), Long Beach State (Big West), UT-Arlington (Southland), Mississippi Valley State (SWAC) and Nevada (WAC).
P.S. NYC Buckets’ John Templon, who had Denver as an NIT #6 seed in his last bracket, now has the Pioneers out of the field. #PANIC!
Denver on the NIT bubble
After last night’s loss in the Sun Belt semifinals, the Denver Pioneers now face a long wait until Selection Sunday — not to find out if they’ll get an NCAA at-large (no chance, thanks to all those sub-100 losses in Sun Belt play), but to find out if they’ll make the NIT.
Mike Scullin of NIT-ology (yes, such a thing exists) has the Pioneers as one of the “last four out” of the NIT field, and that’s before taking into account NIT autobids earned by low-major regular-season conference champs who don’t win their tournaments. Those teams will inevitably clog up a portion of the #7 and #8 seed lines, so Denver’s situation is probably pretty hopeless if Scullin is right.
However, John Templon of NYC Buckets has Denver in a more hopeful, albeit still precarious and uncertain, position. He projects the Pioneers as a #6 seed in the NIT, as of now.
If Denver fans want an NIT bid, they have a lot of rooting interests in various conference tournaments in the coming days. They want #1 seeds to win, or failing that, for teams that would be in either the NCAA or the NIT regardless (for instance, #2 South Dakota State over #4 Western Illinois tonight) to win. What Denver doesn’t want is for teams that didn’t win a regular-season conference title, and don’t have any hope of an at-large bid to either tournament, to go dancing. Each result like that shrinks the NIT bubble.
Also, Denver would be well-served if teams currently projected in the #5-8 range by Scullin and Templon flame out early in their league tourneys, thus perhaps popping their NIT bubbles and moving Denver up in the NIT at-large pecking order.
So, with that in mind, here are some outcomes to root for. [NOTE: I’ll update this list periodically, with boldface italics indicating the desired result happened, and strikeouts indicating it did not.]
* Horizon: #1 Valparaiso over #3 Detroit, tonight.
* Summit League: #2 South Dakota State over #4 Western Illinois, tonight.
* Northeast: #1 Long Island over #3 Robert Morris, tomorrow.
* Patriot: #1 Bucknell over #2 Lehigh, tomorrow.
* Big Sky: #3 Portland State over #2 Weber State tonight. More importantly, #1 Montana wins tourney (semis tonight, final tomorrow). That said, if Montana somehow loses tourney, better that they lose it to Weber State than anyone else. Yes, I know this seems somewhat contradictory. Best-case is Montana over PSU in title game. Worst-case is EWU or PSU winning title. Weber winning title is the middle case. A similar principle holds in the MAC and WAC (see below).
* America East: #1 Stony Brook over #2 Vermont, Saturday.
* MAC: #1 Akron wins. #2 Buffalo, #3 Ohio suffer upsets. (But if somebody beats Akron, better that the champ be Buffalo or Ohio than anybody else.) Thursday-Saturday.
* MEAC: #1 Savannah State wins, Wednesday-Saturday.
* Big West: #1 Long Beach State wins, Thursday-Saturday.
* Southland: #1 UT-Arlington wins, Wednesday-Saturday.
* SWAC: #1 Mississippi Valley State wins, Wednesday-Saturday.
* WAC: #1 Nevada wins. #2 New Mexico State suffers an upset. (But if somebody beats Nevada, better that the champ be NMSU than anybody else.) Thursday-Saturday.
* Ivy: Harvard wins the league, either by Princeton beating Penn tonight or by Harvard beating Penn in a playoff Saturday. (But this may not matter, as the Penn-Princeton winner may earn an NIT at-large bid regardless.)
* A-10, MWC, C-USA & BCS leagues: No out-of-nowhere champions who aren’t currently even likely to go to the NIT. In addition, early “bad” losses by any of the following NIT bubble teams would be great: Arkansas, Iowa, Maryland, Minnesota, Pitt, Saint Bonaventure, Stanford, UCLA, UMass, Virginia Tech, Wyoming.
It ends with a loss
Denver’s bid for its first-ever NCAA Tournament appearance ended in heartbreak at the hands of Western Kentucky tonight — and with it died my plans of a whirlwind trip to Arkansas tomorrow for the Sun Belt championship game. Moments ago, less than seven hours before my flight would have departed, I cancelled my air, car rental and hotel reservations. Sigh. Maybe next year. (But to Vegas instead of Hot Springs.)
Here’s video of my reaction to Denver’s shot at winning or tying the game in the final seconds, and then WKU’s game-sealing free throws at the other end:
And here’s my updated Sun Belt Bracket, along with #sadballz:
This game will hurt you.
Sun Belt Tournament liveblog
I’ll be live-tweeting at @MileHighMids as the Denver Pioneers try to earn their first-ever NCAA birth by winning the Sun Belt Tournament in Hot Springs, AR. If they make the title game Tuesday, I’ll also be live-tweeting my own crazy last-minute trip to Arkansas to watch the game from press row. Details here.
All of my tweets & RTs, and also @DU_MHoops’ tweets & RTs, will appear in the window below, along with any tweets mentioning me or @DU_MHoops. Hit “Click for Live Updates” to start the liveblog. GO PIOS!!!
[Original timestamp Mar 4th, 2012 5:47pm; bumped to top. -ed.]
DU widely projected as a #14 seed; Lunardi on crack?
With the top two seeds in the Sun Belt, #1 Middle Tennessee State and #2 Arkansas-Little Rock, losing yesterday (along with #4 Louisiana-Lafayette, for good measure), #3-seeded Denver is now the nominal favorite to win the tourney, and with it, the league’s NCAA automatic bid.
Of course, that status as the “favorite” will be worth a bucket of warm spit come tip-off tonight — I’m frankly somewhat terrified of much-improved #7 seed Western Kentucky, which I see as a real threat to beat Denver and win the SBC’s auto bid. But being favored does have one side benefit: Denver is now the “projected” Sun Belt representative in the various brackets put out today by “bracketologists.” So we can see where folks have the Pioneers hypothetically seeded in the NCAAs as of now.
For the most part, the answer is about what I expected. Of the folks listed in the Bracket Matrix, sixteen have Denver has a #14 seed, while ten have the Pioneers as a #15 seed. The distinction between #14 and #15 is critical, as college basketball is generally perceived as having a fairly clear-cut top eight teams this year, meaning the #2 seeds will be much harder to beat than the #3s. So if you’re Denver, you really, really want a #14 seed. (Ideally in the Albuquerque pod.)
My Twitter buddy Andy Glockner is among the respected bracketologists with Denver as a #14. So is Jerry Palm, and he’s even got them in Albuquerque.
But the biggest name among the bracketologists, ESPN’s Joe Lunardi, bizarrely has Denver as a #16 seed headed for the “First Four” in Dayton, meaning he thinks the Pioneers — whose profile includes wins over RPI Top 50 teams St. Mary’s, Southern Miss and Middle Tennessee, and RPI Top 100 team Wyoming — are one of the four worst teams in his projected NCAA field. That’s hard to believe, and Glockner is openly mocking Lunardi for it.
That said, recalling the time Niagara was inexplicably thrown into the play-in game, anything is possible. The committee sometimes seems to pay limited attention to seeds lines #13 through #16, which sucks, because the distinctions are really important among those seeds, arguably moreso than the difference between, say, a #6 and a #7, or a #10 and a #12. So I worry a little that Lunardi’s seemingly careless placement of Denver could be repeated in the real bracket.
Just to be safe — and to increase their chances of that #14 seed, or maybe even, dare to dream, a #13 seed — DU fans should root against following “projected auto bid” teams from other leagues. If these teams lose, the resulting champion will almost certainly be below Denver (RPI #90) on the S-curve, whereas the current projected champ might or might not, depending on whom you believe.
Loyola (Maryland), MAAC (RPI #88; title game tonight vs. #126 Fairfield)
Davidson, Southern (RPI #63; title game tonight vs. #246 Western Carolina)
Valparaiso, Horizon (RPI #92; title game tomorrow vs. #152 Detroit)
Bucknell, Patriot (RPI #85; title game Wednesday vs. #109 Lehigh)
UT-Arlington, Southland (RPI #94; tourney starts Wed.; everyone else is sub-100)
Weber State and Montana, Big Sky (RPIs #69, 84; semifinals tomorrow vs. #172 Portland State, #213 Eastern Washington)
Nevada and NMSU, WAC (RPIs #49, 65; tourney starts Wed.; everyone else is sub-100)
Akron, Ohio and Buffalo, MAC (RPIs #70, 71, 79; tourney starts today; everyone else is #97 or worse)
Also — and this a really marginal difference, but you never know — DU might prefer to face North Texas (RPI #201 at last check) instead of Arkansas State (RPI #247) in the title game, since the Mean Green could conceivably crack the RPI Top 200. If DU then beats UNT in the final, the Mean Green’s presence in the Top 200 would improve Denver’s record against teams ranked 101-200 from the current, somewhat ugly 6-4 to a marginally better 8-5. Beating a squad led by future NBA first-round pick Tony Mitchell might also do more to impress the committee, “eye test”-wise, than beating a Red Wolves team with a losing record.
Denver to semifinals; me to Arkansas?
In the survive-and-advance battle for a first-ever NCAA Tournament bid, it’s 1 down, 2 to go for DU.
The Denver Pioneers are headed to the Sun Belt Conference semifinals — and, as the highest remaining seed after a day of upsets, will now be showing up in people’s projected NCAA brackets — after beating South Alabama 61-50 Sunday night.
If #3-seeded Denver wins Monday night, in a semifinal that tips around 7:30 PM Mountain Time, against #7-seeded Western Kentucky (which upset #2 UALR today), I will be boarding a Southwest Airlines flight bound for Arkansas the next morning — roughly eight hours after the game ends, in fact — to attend the championship game as a member of the credentialed press. On the other hand, the Pioneers lose, I will cancel my plane, rental car and hotel reservations, and remain in Colorado. So I will leave my law firm on Monday afternoon not knowing if I’m coming into work the next day, and I will put my girls to bed Monday night not knowing if I’ll see them the next morning.
I’ve already begun packing for this potential trip, not because I’m overconfident or assuming anything, but because I simply won’t have very much time at all to do so tomorrow night, if necessary.
At this point, I should probably step back and explain to any new readers just who the heck I am. I’m an attorney in Denver, and a married, 30-year-old father of three girls under age 4. I’m not a DU alum — I went to USC for undergrad and Notre Dame for law school — nor do I have any tangible connection to the university, other than geographic proximity. But I’m a longtime mid-major basketball fan, and back in 2010, inspired by Kyle Whelliston’s Mid-Majority, I decided to “adopt” the Pioneers as “my” mid-major team, making an emotional investment in Joe Scott’s squad before the season began.
Moreover, rather than just being a fan, I decided to start up a blog dedicated to covering the team — I’ve been a blogger for almost a decade, and I have a degree in print journalism, though journalism is just a hobby for me nowadays rather than a career — and try to get credentialed as a member of the press at DU. I did that, and reported on the team at a blog called Pioneer Pulse all last season. This season, I switched over to Tumblr and renamed the site “Mile High Mids.” But the bottom line is that I’ve been “covering,” and rooting for, the Pioneers for two seasons now. So while a mid-week trip to Arkansas is mighty inconvenient, I feel almost compelled to go. It would be awfully anticlimactic, after all of that, to miss the program’s potential all-time crowning moment. So if they go, I go. Make it to the title game, and I’m there.
If you’re a Denver fan (particularly if you’re a DU student) and you’re new to the blog, I would point you first to my write-up of the Middle Tennessee State win, complete with tons of photos and some videos.
Next, I would point you to my archive of recaps for the Mid-Majority’s 800 Games Project, a crowdsourced collection of personalized, first-person recaps of games played by teams below the Red Line, i.e., “mid-majors.” A few of my recaps are of Northern Colorado games, but most of them are of Denver. Anyway, here they are.
You can also check out my posts about Denver here, and at my aforementioned old blog.
Last but not least, you may want to read up on the history of this blog’s mascots, a pair of stuffed basketballs (or “ballz”) named DU Bally and Mile High Bally. You’ll be seeing a lot of them if you follow my coverage over the next day or two (or week or two??). Here they are tonight, with my Sun Belt bracket on my Giant Bracket Wall:
The Mid-Majority gloss and primer may also be helpful if you see references you don’t understand to things like #superhoops (3-pointers) or “The Other 24” (the mid-major conferences), among countless other inside references and jokes.
Anyway, I’ll be live-tweeting the DU-WKU game as I watch it Monday night, and if all goes well, the live-tweeting will continue as I travel to Arkansas on Tuesday. If that happens, it promises to be epic. You can follow me on Twitter at @MileHighMids (and also @brendanloy).
So those are the basics. Stay tuned and Go Pios!
P.S. I’ve also created a Twitter List of accounts of DU folks at the tourney in Hot Springs, or otherwise related to DU’s team or the SBC in some way. You can view it here. If you have any suggestions for who I should add, please leave them in comments here, or tweet them at me.
A blog about 
