Wednesday, Oct. 22, 2008 | 12:29 p.m.
The Mountain West Conference on Wednesday announced its five finalist cities to host the MWC Basketball Championships from 2011 to 2013.
That quintet is the Thomas & Mack Center in Las Vegas, The Pit in Albuquerque, Pepsi Center in Denver, Cox Arena in San Diego and Energy Solutions Arena in Salt Lake City.
Those cities move forward in the Request For Proposal process. A final decision is expected in June.
Sixteen cities, featuring 27 different facilities, received the initial RFP in July. Final proposals and bid specs are due in February. After each is analyzed, the MWC subcommittee will review the proposals and make a recommendation for the MWC Joint Council in Phoenix in May.
The Joint Council decision will be forwarded to the MWC Board of Directors for final approval during in June. It is anticipated an announcement will be made at the completion of that Board of Directors meetings.
The tournament site is an ongoing point of contention among the league's coaches. It was held at the Mack from 1999-2003, moved to Denver from 2004-06 and returned to the Mack the past two seasons. UNLV won the men's tournaments on its home floor in 2007 and 2008, but the Mack is pitched as a neutral site for the event.
A lot of the motivation for the move back to Las Vegas from Denver appeared to be attendance-based. In Denver in 2006, the average attendance was 7,489, while it was 13,483 in Thomas & Mack last year.
At last week's conference media day in Las Vegas, Rebels coach Lon Kruger called Las Vegas "clearly" the best place to host the tournament.
"If we want to be a big-time conference, then we need a big-time atmosphere at our showcase event," he said. "We've had that the last couple of years. I also understand, as an opposing coach, you don't like coming into someone's home arena. I guess that's why there'll be another vote soon as to what happens with the conference tournament."
The squeakiest of all wheels regarding the tournament site issue has been Steve Alford, now entering his second season at New Mexico.
"We're not football," Alford said last week. "Football, you can go 6-6, and they call you bowl eligible, so it's been a successful year. You're 6-6 in basketball, you're getting fired; that's the bottom line.
"You've got 340 schools competing for 65 spots (in the NCAA Tournament), so if you really want fairness in a competitive nature, you have to have a neutral site and obviously in our league right now we don't have that."
Of the five proposed sites, only two of them are not home floors for a Mountain West school; the Pepsi Center and Energy Solutions Arena. Of course, Energy Solutions is just a few miles down the road from the University of Utah.
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