Columnist Ron Kantowski: Tourneys: Good, bad or ugly?

Thursday, March 9, 2000 | 10:50 a.m.

Ron Kantowski's column appears Tuesday and Thursday. Reach him at ron@ vegas.com or 259-4088.

If you're a college hoop-a-holic, what's not to like about the Mountain West Conference basketball tournament?

First, there's the chance to see all 7 1/2 teams under one roof. (Sorry, San Diego State. Your Aztecs could come out for tonight's game against UNLV with Flubber on their sneakers and still lose by 10.)

Second, you'll have the chance to see as many as ... well, at least one of the teams that will advance to the NCAA Tournament. And in that not even the winner is guaranteed an automatic bid to The Dance, the competition may be even more keen.

Provided UNLV, Utah and/or New Mexico, which bring the big crowds, play deep into the tourney, there should be plenty of atmosphere, too. (But maybe not as much as could be, given the MWC is making all the games available to the hometown television markets, including Las Vegas. Somebody from the MWC should check with NASCAR about how to market your product. I'm not saying you should charge $135 a ticket, but you shouldn't give it away, either.)

The conference tournaments, at least the ones that come with an automatic NCAA bid, give even bad teams such as San Diego State one last chance to run the table and sneak into the NCAAs in the manner that 12-18 Florida A&M did last year.

Those are all positives. The big negative is that the conference tournaments virtually reduce the regular season into nothing more than a series of meaningless pickup games. If ESPN didn't have all those prime-time programming hours to fill, there would be no need to keep track of the standings.

Utah coach Rick Majerus thinks the regular-season champion should get the NCAA bid and the conference tourney concept be done away with.

"I don't like (the tournament) for academic principles," said the man who has discovered a fountain of Utes in the Great Salt Lake. "We (left Utah) Tuesday, and if we lose (today), we won't be back in Utah for Friday classes. I can't see taking a week out of school to determine something that has just been determined over the course of two months."

But barring a move to the Pac-10 (which has managed to resist staging a tournament) or the Ivy League (which will never have one) there's nothing Majerus can do about it.

As long as the conference tournaments continue to turn a profit, that is.

You can talk about bubble teams until Dick Vitale is blue in the face ... well, maybe not that long. But the bottom line about these conference shindigs is just that -- the bottom line. It has gotten to where those affiliated with the power conferences find it hard to get excited for the tournaments.

It wasn't like that in the old days, when the conference tourneys were like starting the NCAA Tournament a week early. When only 16 teams went dancing, a loss in the conference tourney meant you were spending Monday in biology class.

I remember what a big deal it was when Maryland finally broke through in the ACC tourney. "I'm gonna take that trophy, strap it onto the hood of my car and drive around the state of North Carolina all day, beeping my horn," then-Terps' coach Lefty Driesell said with glee.

If he did that today, nobody would hear him honking. All those Tar Heels and Dookies fans would be on their way to the Mideast Regional.