There’s no one correct way to hold a conference tournament

Thirty-two men’s basketball conference tournaments are quite the disparate group.

Even the brackets are vastly incongruent, ranging from the Summit League’s symmetrical eight-team format to the West Coast Conference’s multi-bye bracket that looks more like two tentacles extending from the championship game. But that’s not all. Some leagues play in home venues, others in neutral sites and still others in home sites disguised as neutral venues. League strategies vary, resources vary, revenue models vary — even the variations vary.

“They are different,” Paul Brazeau, the ACC’s senior associate commissioner for men’s basketball, told On3, emphasizing that last word.

Even under pre-pandemic conditions, many, if not most, tournaments were not substantial revenue-drivers for leagues. If there is one constant among them, it’s their drive to create an environment that maximizes the student-athlete experience. In fact, Jack Watkins, the Missouri Valley’s longtime tournament director, said, “If you work in a conference office and you run championships, that is the reason you do what you do. There are lifetime memories that come out of those. It’s a badge of courage for everybody that works in a conference office.”

How they work to achieve that is a study in business operations, and in working in concert with venue operators, community leaders and TV partners. On3 examined the business decisions involved in staging five league tournaments: the AAC, the ACC, the Big West, the Horizon League and the Missouri Valley. Consider it a slice of conference tournament week not found on your television screen. While each concludes with one team jubilantly punching their ticket to the NCAA tournament, there’s plenty of weighty decisions, heavy lifting and curveballs before the ball is tipped.

“You never know what is going to pop up,” said Big West commissioner Dan Butterly, who still has flashbacks of a shot-clock malfunction at Denver’s then-named Pepsi Center that caused a 45-minute delay while he worked at the Mountain West. “You have to roll with the punches. Try to do it confidently, patiently.”

Rob Carolla, Learfield’s director of industry relations, was among administrative leaders of the Big 12 tournament for 13 years after helping run the Big East tournament at Madison Square Garden for another eight. The best-run tournaments are “ones where participants — from teams to officials to media — can focus completely on their jobs,” he said. “As a host, you want coaches, players and administrators to be able to focus on their primary goals: winning the game. And the media should be able to concentrate on their jobs, too. From TV areas to radio to writers, your hope is they can tell the great stories surrounding the teams and the student-athletes.”

The AAC: Texas is best

AAC commissioner Mike Aresco faced a decision. As his league tournament spent time in Hartford, Conn., Orlando and Memphis in recent years, league stakeholders knew they wanted to find a stable anchor home for it. It boiled down to Orlando or the new $540 million Dickies Arena in Fort Worth, which opened in November 2019.

When a vote among athletic directors deadlocked, Aresco broke the tie, choosing Dickies Arena, which is in its second season as host. It turned out to be a master stroke.

It isn’t just, as Aresco said, that the arena is nicer than most pro arenas. One of the driving forces behind Orlando serving as host was that UConn had a strong fan presence in The Villages, a retirement community about 65 miles north of Orlando. But with the Huskies migrating back to the Big East in 2020, Aresco knew the league would have struggled mightily with attendance in Orlando without UConn.

And with the league’s massive footprint — extending from Florida to Pennsylvania to Texas — and the coming configuration of the league post-realignment, it will have a much stronger presence in Texas. While it loses Houston to the Big 12, it will add UTSA, Rice, SMU and North Texas.

The deal with Dickies Arena has been extended through 2026, with an option for longer. Aresco said the tournament is not going to yield a financial windfall although they will generate revenue even after expenses. Regardless, with a strong ambience — there will be a fan fest and live music — success is multi-faceted.

“It doesn’t have to be a huge revenue-driver to be really important,” Aresco said of the tournament, which begins Thursday. “It is a chance for everybody to get together to put on a really good night in a national TV event that people pay attention to. … I hope we get the kind of crowds we think we will get and the atmosphere we think we will because everything is in place.”

The ACC: To move or not to move

Even a tournament steeped in as much tradition as the ACC’s continues to evolve. With its footprint extending from Miami to Boston to South Bend, the conversation within the ACC office is whether to continue to have its tournament hop-scotch up and down the East Coast, as it has done in recent seasons. Or should it find one tournament location that makes sense for operating costs and revenues; for trying to maximize brand growth; and for enhancing marketing efforts through partnerships.

“There are various thoughts and opinions on it,” said Brazeau, the senior associate commissioner. “We’re trying to make data-based decisions and sound reasoning in terms of what our path will be.”

This year, the event returns to the Barclays Center in Brooklyn, the site of the tournament in 2017 and ’18. It is a fan-friendly site because of the quality of area, seating capacity (17,773) and easy access to the subway. And a lot of ancillary events aren’t necessarily needed because, well, you’re in New York and, as Brazear said, just walk outside your door and New York is an event unto itself 24-7.

Without revealing specific numbers, he said, the ACC typically covers its expenses, adding “that is significant because there are real costs. We’ve been fortunate throughout the business operations that we have been able to run economically and efficiently so that we have exceeded expenses in terms of our revenues.”

The ACC tournament is so tradition-rich that there is more than enough compelling material for a 10-part, 10-hour documentary, “The Tournament: A History of ACC Men’s Basketball Presented by New York Life” airing on ACC Network. But even this event is not immune from change, as league officials remain nimble. Once the ACC tournament was a three-day event. Now it’s a five-day event; the 2015 tournament was its first to start on a Tuesday and its first since 1981 to finish on a Saturday. (Brazeau is reasonable that some all fans may not be able to come each and every day to the event because, you know, “some have these things called jobs,” he joked.)

“Over 60 years, we have had many classrooms from which to learn,” Brazeau said. “There’s been many adaptations and adjustments and fixes along the way. And there’ll be more going forward.”

The Big West: New venue looks to be a winner

When Butterly assumed the Big West’s commissioner’s post in July 2020, he inherited a conference tournament whose expenses exceeded the revenue that the event generated. In fact, the 2020 cancellation of the event because of COVID-19 actually saved the league money.

The league has a history of staging memorable tournaments, including with star-powered UNLV in the early 1990s, and spent the past decade playing in the Honda Center in Anaheim, Calif. But the 18,000-seat venue clearly was too large. The other issue: When league officials solicited feedback from student-athletes, they indicated that the Anaheim event seemed more like a garden variety road trip than a special experience.

Then came serendipity. When the pandemic prompted the tournament to move to Michelob Ultra Arena in the Las Vegas suburb of Paradise last season, league officials had an opportunity to visit the still-under-construction Dollar Loan Center in nearby Henderson. Kerry Bubolz, the Las Vegas Golden Knights’ chief operating officer, and others made a memorable presentation, walking them through what the $84-million, 6,000-seat arena would look like on game night.

Done deal. The Big West signed a three-year agreement with the arena, with an option for more. When it tips off Tuesday, it will be the first event in the facility. Butterly said student-athletes have been fired up that playing in a new venue and in the Las Vegas Valley gives the event a big-time feel.

“Henderson wants to make this their championship,” said Butterly, who has been running championship events for 25-plus years. “I try to make our events feel really big even though sometimes we may not have the resources. You still want it to feel really big.”

He said Henderson has gone all in with street sign and billboard promotion, and media is running tournament-focused ads. Sponsorship activity has been strong and Butterly is optimistic that the location drives ticket sales. But here’s the kicker.

“You’ll love this: The mayor of Henderson is Mayor March,” Butterly said, referencing Mayor Debra March. “The first event in March, the first event in the arena in March Madness. It doesn’t get much better than this. It feels like a fairy tale in some ways.”

The Horizon: Finally, a place for the tournament to call home

When Julie Roe Lach first joined the Horizon League in the summer of 2014, the top-seeded team hosted the tournament games. That meant a great experience for the players on that team (Valparaiso in 2015) but not all that meaningful of an experience for the rest of the student-athletes.

Then came a four-year Horizon tournament stint in Detroit, which was instructive on two fronts. No slight to Detroit, but the event needed a more central home to be a gathering point within the league’s Midwest footprint. Host sites Joe Louis Arena (2016, ’17) and Little Caesars Arena (2018, ’19) also were too large. So the Horizon hired a firm to put together a request for proposal. Seven cities bid on the event.

When the semifinals tip off tonight (the first two rounds were on campus sites), this will be the third consecutive season they will be played at 6,800-seat Indiana Farmers Coliseum in Indianapolis. And don’t expect it to be played elsewhere anytime soon. The event is not a huge revenue-driver for the league at this point. But there are two central priorities: enhancing the student-athlete experience and making the event something that the community fully embraces.

There are several prominent events surrounding basketball. The league is hosting an International Women’s Day Celebration on Tuesday. It will feature a conversation between Susan Baughman, president of the 2022 College Football Playoff Host Committee, and Tully Bevilaqua, a former WNBA and Australian Olympic athlete. In addition, this year’s event also features a School Day, an esports combine and a fan zone just steps from the arena.

“We’ve got to make this a culminating pinnacle moment for our student-athletes,” Roe Lach said.

While just the semifinals and finals are played at the arena, Roe Lach hopes the league extends it at some point to include the quarterfinals and eventually all teams. And during the years the Big Ten plays its conference tournament in Indianapolis, as was the case in 2021 and is this week as well, it only intensifies the festive basketball experience.

“It is a college basketball fanatics’ dream,” Roe Lach said. “We are in the process of extending the deal because this is exactly where we need to be.”

The MVC: ‘Arch Madness’ in the perfect place

The Missouri Valley tournament final, played on the Sunday before Selection Sunday, is viewed in the league office as the official ignition point for Championship Week. 

Known as “Arch Madness,” the event has seen its share of memorable moments since moving to St. Louis in 1991. There was Gregg Marshall’s Wichita State team securing an unbeaten regular season in 2014 as well as overnight celebrity Sister Jean of Loyola-Chicago fame needing a security detail to make her way through Enterprise Center in recent years. And Sunday brought another one, with Loyola beating Drake to earn the league’s automatic berth. 

The league has played in Enterprise Center for so long, since 1995, that the venue has had four names during that span. And few league tournaments ideally fit their locale more than this one. Watkins, who has been with the league for 30 years, deemed it one big family reunion each March. No school is located beyond a five-hour drive to the arena, so out-of-town direct spending by fans is substantial. The Official MVC Fan Hangout in Ballpark Village in St. Louis is a particularly popular attraction. 

Even as realignment has taken hold in recent years — Creighton and Wichita State are among the former members, and Loyola is readying to move to the A-10 — Watkins estimates that the annual economic impact for St. Louis during the event is still close to $10 million. And under pre-pandemic conditions, Watkins said, tournament revenue far exceeds expenses. He said there is usually between $100,000 and $200,000 in net revenue after expenses. 

This is a major event that warrants year-round planning; for instance, team hotels are assigned in late July. But despite all the consistency over the years, no two tournaments are ever alike. Each has its own feel, its own tenor, especially last season during the COVID-impacted event.

Before one of the games, a player approached Watkins and said, “Mr. Watkins, I just want to tell you, even though we have only 3,000 fans here, we are so grateful that we can play in front of family and friends. You guys are trying to do the best thing possible to keep us safe.”

“That,” Watkins said, his voice choked with emotion, “will stick with me forever.”