Submitted for your consideration:  Do college basketball’s conference tournaments mean anything anymore?

Of course I’m not talking about the MVC, the WCC, or the MAAC – or any of those conferences for which there is but one invitation to The Big Dance. These tournaments mean everything –perhaps too much, as a team that dominates its conference during regular season play can have one bad night and see its season go down the drain. Certainly there is drama of the highest kind in the alphabet soup conferences.

No, I’m talking here about the glamour conferences. The ones that dominate media coverage of college basketball. The ones that are amateur in name only. The home of “one and done” players putting in their time before heading to the NBA. The Big East, the Big Ten, the ACC. These conferences have traditionally sent at least four teams to the NCAA tournament each year, and as they’ve grown in size by engulfing major media market teams from smaller conferences, they’ve gained even more at-large bids.

One could argue that the drama for these conference tournaments has been usurped; pretty much every team with a decent record is going to the NCAAs. When you really get down to it, you could actually make the case that winning one of these tournaments is detrimental to a team’s chances for March Madness success. For example, no Big East team has won the NCAA title since the conference expanded to 16 teams and instituted a conference tournament that brings to mind the Bataan Death March. Coincidence?

I do not bring this up merely to watch myself type. I had a decision to make.
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Breaking news – girls are different from boys.

While I’ve had a few years to familiarize myself with the more obvious differences in the sexes, I had to admit that I’d never considered the question in the context of ice hockey. So when presented with the perfect opportunity to come up to speed on that topic, I jumped on it.

I had spent the previous night at a sold-out TD Garden, home of the tradition-laden Boston Bruins and Boston Celtics…and a pretty popular 59-year-old college hockey get-together they call the Beanpot.

On this night I was headed to Conte Forum, on the campus of Boston College, where I would experience that event’s little sister – the 33^rd annual Women’s Beanpot.
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All cell phone photos courtesy of Martha Mae

First things first.

It’s called the Beanpawt, and it’s held every February at The Gahden. As in “Oh my Gawd, I’m goin’ ovah to The Gahden for the Beanpawt!”

The alert reader will of course recognize that the sporting event du jour takes place in Boston, home of the hypnotic, syrupy sweet accent popularized by postman extraordinaire Cliff Clavin.

I had not been to the Gahden since it was the Boston Garden, i.e. before it became headlined by a series of financial services companies. To get there back in those days, you simply took either the Green or Orange line to North Station and then followed the rats.

If you were attending a game at that time, it was tremendously helpful if you were a “people person”, since you and your fellow fans were all going to be squeezing into seats that conformed to the size of the average Bostonian – the 1928 version. And of course you hoped like hell that it wasn’t an overly warm day, because there was no air conditioning in the building.

People loved this place. No, really – they did.
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Brown University's Freshman Sensation Sean McGonagill

We were young. We were giddy.

Wait, let me start again…

We were giddy. Blame it on Sean McGonagill.

Doc and I were still basking in the glow of one of the most unexpected treats we’d ever witnessed on a college basketball court – a freshman tossing in 39 points over, under and around everyone in sight, while wearing headgear from the Hannibal Lecter Collection.

So it was only natural that the seedling of an idea that had been germinating for a few days began to sprout and ripen at an alarming rate. I’m talking Jack and the Beanstalk stuff.

A little background…

See, way back at the beginning of the “It’s Game Time Somewhere” Tour’s Winter Sports Swing, the first casualty of fickle weather had been a scheduled pilgrimage to Ithaca, NY, where through a sepia-toned lens I planned to vicariously re-live my own college basketball “playing” days, if I may be somewhat expansive when using that term.
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…Continued from the previous post.

There we were with 70 or 80 of our closest friends, on a night that a dog wouldn’t have sent us out into.

I was with old friend and hoops aficionado Doc, and we were making the best of a bad situation. Ice-stormed out of an originally scheduled pilgrimage to see Doc’s beloved Syracuse Orangemen play against Connecticut, we had opted for a somewhat less glamorous Division I basketball contest – an Ivy League game.

We were at Brown University’s Pizzitola Center, where the Bears were playing host to the Columbia Lions. Somewhere in there was a joke about tigers just begging to be cracked, but we were still a little despondent about the weather having forced us to stay close to Doc’s Pawtucket, RI home.
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