Recordpub.com - MAC could benefit from NCAA Tournament growth

A National Invitation Tournament appearance and a chance to play a first-round home game Wednesday night against Tulsa are the spoils of victory for Kent State as the Mid-American Conference regular-season champions.

If the NCAA follows through on a possible expansion of its tournament field from 65 to 96 teams in the not-to-distant future, a conference championship-deciding game like Kent State’s regular-season finale at Akron on March 5 would have had far more on the line than an NIT bid.

“We would have been playing for an (NCAA Tournament) bid,” said Kent State athletic director Laing Kennedy, who is completing the final year of a five-year period on the NCAA Tournament selection committee.

It’s a scenario that has Kennedy in favor of the taking a good long look at expanding the tournament field.

Now is a good time to explore the idea because the NCAA’s television contract with CBS is up for renewal or opt-out.

“The contract ends in 2013, but there is a clause that says we can opt out of it early and re-negotiate,” said Kennedy. “The timing is such that a decision would have to be done between now and July. By then, we would have to have some models that would work.”

The most workable early model features a 96-team field with the top 32 teams receiving first-round byes.

Kennedy said the key to gaining support from leagues like the Mid-American Conference would be a guarantee of NCAA bids to both conference tournament and regular-season champions. Currently, only tournament champions receive automatic berths. The MAC hasn’t sent two teams to an NCAA Tournament since 1999 when Kent State won the tournament title and Miami received a rare at-large bid.

“My initial thought is that expansion would be positive, provided that there are some provisions to protect conferences with regular-season winners and tournament winners. That sort of thing.

“At the same time, what we have right now is not bad. (The NCAA Tournament) is a great event. It is highly selective. It is a world-class event. So you really don’t want to mess up the golden goose, either.”

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FINAL BRACKET WAS THE TOUGHEST — Kennedy and his colleagues on the NCAA Tournament selection committee deserved some time to relax after announcing the 65-team field for the 2010 edition of March Madness on Sunday night.

“That bracket was the hardest to put together in my five tears on the committee,” said Kennedy. “There were so many well-balanced teams in the middle of the bracket, and there were two hands worth of teams we were considering right down to the end that didn’t get in. Virginia Tech, Illinois, teams like that.

“We worked Saturday night until 1 a.m., then started right back up Sunday at 8 a.m. and worked right up until the selection show on CBS.”

Kennedy was back at his post in the M.A.C. Center on Monday, but he won’t be in town long enough to see Kent State host Tulsa in Wednesday’s first round of the NIT. Instead, he leaves early Wednesday morning for Milwaukee, where he will serve as that site’s committee representative for the first and second round at the NCAA Tournament.

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TINY NIT PAYDAY FOR FORD — Kennedy said last week he hopes to have a new contract extension in place for KSU men’s basketball coach Geno Ford around the time of the Final Four, which will be held at Lucas Oil Stadium in Indianapolis April 3-5.

That’s good news for Ford, who will encounter some of the inequities in his current contract as the Golden Flashes try to make a run in the NIT.

While studying the bonus structure in Ford’s contract this week, he will not receive a bonus for his team’s NIT appearance. To gain even a small bonus, the Flashes have to win. When Jim Christian was head coach at Kent State, he was guaranteed $12,500, or five percent of his annual salary, just for making it into the NIT.

Christian also would have received $1,000 for a first-round NIT win, $2,000 for a second win, $4,000 for a third win and $8,000 for making it to the NIT championship game. If he had led his team to an NIT title, Christian would have made another $20,000.

And Ford? He gets $500 for every NIT win. If he hoists the championship trophy at Madison Square Garden in a few weeks, he’ll make $2,500 in bonus money.

Just to show how out of date that kind of bonus structure is, Keith Dambrot’s contract at the University of Akron would have paid him $2,500 per win in the NIT and $15,000 for an NIT championship, and that was before he re-negotiated his deal following the Zips’ MAC Tournament title last season.

Dambrot would have been guaranteed close to $5,000 just for making the NIT field.

Ford has two years remaining on the four-year contract he signed in April of 2008. With a $175,000 base and $206,000 annual salary, his deal ranks in the bottom third of Mid-American Conference coaches. Ford was voted the MAC Coach of the Year by the conference media and by the Sporting News after leading the Flashes to just their fourth regular-season title in school history. He was also named the NABC District 14 Coach of the Year by his piers in the National Association of Basketball Coaches last week.

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Contact David Carducci at dcarducci@recordpub.com