If the Mountain West Conference Tournament opened this week and the top two seeds played their way to the championship round, as they did a year ago, the league’s worst Pepsi Center nightmare would become a reality.
Vacant seats all around.
League-leading San Diego State (15-6, 8-1) and second-place UNLV (13-8, 7-2) typically send the fewest fans to Denver. UNLV can count on forward Louis Amundson to at least draw his friends and family from Boulder.
But the lone attendance highlight in two years at the Pepsi Center was last year’s finale, when fans of No. 2 seed New Mexico drove up I-25 for the New Mexico-Utah men’s-women’s championship doubleheader. Give the league credit for admitting the mistake of moving the tournament to Denver and correcting it by returning to Las Vegas next season. But the reversal won’t come in time to help league coffers this season.
MWC commissioner Craig Thompson said, “This is the third year in Denver, and it’s probably the slowest sales to date.” He was referring to the 450-ticket allotment for each school. He attributed the slow start to a “wait-and-see” attitude given the league’s parity.
He suspects fans of the Front Range schools are waiting on the starting times for first-round games and for individual date sales. Left unsaid by Thompson is the fact Colorado State is looking at a Tuesday play-in game against Texas Christian to even make the tournament.
Thompson remains perplexed by Denver’s ability to sell out early for NCAA opening weekend games but not support the MWC Tournament, even when there were two obvious first-round draft picks a year ago at the Pepsi Center: Utah’s Andrew Bogut and New Mexico’s Danny Granger.
“I don’t think locally people got too energized to see those two draft picks,” Thompson said. “I’d like to know the mind-set of those local fans and why they buy a ticket to see Syracuse, Maryland and Texas when the NCAA came in but not Bogut and Granger.”
Schedule lottery
BYU travels up the road to Utah tonight for a rare midweek meeting between rivals. The Utah teams are used to playing Saturday or on a Big Monday telecast.
“It’s where it’s at. Crowd-wise you’d like to have it on a Saturday, but it’s not my decision,” Utah coach Ray Giacoletti said.
The rivalry scheduling is just another casualty of the nine-team computer-fed format this season. Between Colorado State playing four of its first five games on the road and the elimination of a week of pre-rivalry buildup, the computer formatting has been as random as buying a quick-pick lottery ticket.
Footnotes
When BYU ended New Mexico’s 21-game home winning streak last week, it marked the third time BYU snapped a lengthy Lobos home-court winning streak. The Cougars ended a 41-game streak in 1998 and a 24-game streak in 1975. … With BYU’s midseason surge, the Cougars’ Dave Rose has jumped into what had been a two-man race for MWC coach of the year between San Diego State’s Steve Fisher and Air Force’s Jeff Bzdelik.
The improvement by junior college transfer guard Rashaun Broadus and the rapid maturation of freshman center Trent Plaisted have boosted the Cougars.
Natalie Meisler can be reached at 303-820-1295 or nmeisler@denverpost.com.
