March 3, 2003

By Mike Douchant

Here are some names and numbers of note about previous conference tournament competition as teams tune up for the main event by jockeying for position in the NCAA playoff bracket:

AMERICA EAST
The 1989 North Atlantic Tournament was dubbed the MIT (Measles Invitational Tourney) because all spectators were banned because of a measles outbreak. Delaware competed for 17 years in the East Coast Conference and never won an ECC Tournament championship. But the Blue Hens entered the AEC predecessor, the North Atlantic, in 1992 and won their first-ever title and went to the NCAA playoffs for the initial time. They successfully defended their crown the next year before closing out the decade with another set of back-to-back tourney titles.

ATLANTIC COAST
Maryland, ranking fourth in both polls, lost in overtime against eventual NCAA champion North Carolina State, 103-100, in the 1974 final in what some believe might have been the greatest college game ever played. Three players from each team earned All-American honors during their careers--N.C. State's David Thompson, Tom Burleson and Monte Towe and Maryland's John Lucas, Len Elmore and Tom McMillen. The Terrapins had four players score at least 20 points--Lucas, McMillen, Owen Brown and Mo Howard--in a 20-point victory over 22-6 North Carolina (105-85) in the semifinals. The Terps, of course, didn't participate in the NCAA playoffs that year because a 32-team bracket allowing teams other than the league champion to be chosen on an at-large basis from the same conference wasn't adopted until the next season.

ATLANTIC SUN
Eleven of the last 12 championship games of the old Trans America Athletic Conference were decided by at least nine points. Florida Atlantic won a first-game contest in 2000 after going winless in regular-season conference competition.

ATLANTIC 10
Despite struggling the first half of last season, it was a shock that Temple didn't reach the semifinals for the 20th consecutive tourney.

BIG EAST
St. John's, which lost to Notre Dame by 20 points in the 2002 quarterfinals, doesn't seem to have any advantage at Madison Square Garden. It lost five consecutive tourney games on its homecourt by an average margin of 11.4 points from 1987 through 1991.

BIG SKY
Montana, capitalizing on a homecourt advantage, overcame a jinx by winning back-to-back tournament titles in 1991 and 1992. The Grizzlies had just two losing regular-season league records from 1976 through 1990, but they didn't win the tournament title in that span, losing the championship game five times from 1978 through 1984.

BIG SOUTH
The No. 1 seed won this unpredictable tourney only five times in the first 17 years. Radford, the winningest school in league history, failed to reach the postseason tournament final for nine years until capturing the event in 1998.

BIG TEN
Illinois won as many games in the 1999 tourney as the Illini did in regular-season conference competition that season (3-13).

BIG 12
Kansas won the first three championship games from 1997 through 1999 by at least 14 points. The last three finals were decided by a minimum of nine points.

BIG WEST
Pacific didn't compile a winning league record from 1979 through 1992, but the Tigers climaxed three consecutive appearances in the tournament semifinals by advancing to the '92 championship game.

COLONIAL ATHLETIC
Navy, seeded No. 8 in 1991 in its last year in the tournament before joining the Patriot League, upset top seed James Madison in overtime, 85-82, in the opening round.

CONFERENCE USA
Three of four C-USA Tournament champions from 1997 through 2000 won four games in four days. Cincinnati captured six league tournament titles in seven years from 1992 through 1998 in the Great Midwest and C-USA.

HORIZON LEAGUE
The first two tournament winners (Oral Roberts '80 and Oklahoma City '81) of the league's forerunner, the Midwestern City, subsequently shed Division I status and de-emphasized to the NAIA level. ORU, which also won the crown in 1984, returned to Division I status in 1993-94. Butler lost its first 12 games in the tourney until breaking into the win column in 1992.

METRO ATLANTIC ATHLETIC
Eight different schools won the tournament title in an eight-year span from 1992 through 1999.

MID-AMERICAN
Bowling Green and Western Michigan never have won the MAC Tournament.

MID-CONTINENT
The first tournament final in 1984 featured two teams with losing league records in regular-season competition (Western Illinois and Cleveland State).

MID-EASTERN ATHLETIC
North Carolina A&T won seven consecutive titles from 1982 through 1988. The Aggies defeated Howard in the championship game each of the first six years of their streak with the middle four of them decided by a total of only 17 points.

MISSOURI VALLEY
Indiana State won only two of its next 20 MVC tourney games after All-American Larry Bird led the Sycamores to the 1979 title. Drake, the only current member other than Indiana State to advance to the NCAA Final Four in the last 40 years, has never reached the MVC Tournament championship game. The Bulldogs won a first-round game in 1997 after going winless in regular-season conference competition.

MOUNTAIN WEST
Not once has Air Force reached the championship game of the WAC or MWC.

NORTHEAST
The final pitted the top two seeds against each other 11 times in a 13-year span from 1983 through 1995.

OHIO VALLEY
Former member Western Kentucky reached the championship game in eight of the OVC's first 10 tourneys. Tennessee Tech won only one tournament game from 1975 through 1992.

PACIFIC-10
Arizona won the last three tourney finals from 1988 through 1990 by a minimum of 16 points before the league discontinued the event until reviving it last year when the Wildcats won the championship game by 10 against Southern California.

PATRIOT LEAGUE
No seed worse than third has reached the championship game. In 1999, Navy became the first Patriot regular-season champion to be upset in the first round when the Midshipmen bowed to Lehigh, 53-45.

SOUTHEASTERN
Although Kentucky standout center Alex Groza saw limited action in the 1947 tournament because of a back injury, the Wildcats cruised to victories over Vanderbilt (98-29), Auburn (84-18), Georgia Tech (75-53) and Tulane (55-38). UK was also without Converse All-American guard Jack Parkinson (serving in the military), but the five-man all-tourney team was comprised of nothing but Wildcats--forwards Jack Tingle and Joe Holland, center Wallace "Wah Wah" Jones and guards Ken Rollins and Ralph Beard. UK (24) has won more than half of the SEC's tourneys.

SOUTHERN
Jerry Martin, an outfielder who hit .251 in 11 years with the Philadelphia Phillies, Chicago Cubs, San Francisco Giants, Kansas City Royals and New York Mets from 1974 through 1984, was named MVP in the 1971 tournament after the 6-1 guard led the Paladins to the title with 22-, 36- and 19-point performances to pace the tourney in scoring. Two years earlier, current Davidson coach Bob McKillop scored three points for East Carolina against the Lefty Driesell-coached Wildcats in the 1969 SC Tournament championship game.

SOUTHLAND
North Texas State's Kenneth Lyons outscored Louisiana Tech's Karl Malone, 47-6, when Lyons established a still existing single-game scoring record in the 1983 tournament quarterfinals. Malone led the SLC in rebounding (10.3 rpg) and steals (1.9 spg) that season as a freshman before going on to score more than 30,000 points in the NBA. Two years earlier, McNeese won a first-round game after going winless in regular-season conference competition.

SOUTHWESTERN ATHLETIC
Regular-season champion Grambling State lost by 50 points to Southern (105-55) in the 1987 final. An interesting twist that year was the fact Bob Hopkins, Grambling's first-year coach, had coached Southern the previous three seasons. The previous season, Prairie View A&M, after compiling a putrid regular-season record of 3-24, reached the tourney final before losing to Mississippi Valley State, which then lost to top-ranked Duke (85-78) in the first round of the NCAA playoffs.

SUN BELT
South Alabama's stall didn't prevent the Jaguars from losing to New Orleans, 22-20, on Nate Mills' last-second jumper in the 1978 final. The next season, the Sun Belt became the first league to experiment with a 45-second shot clock. The four different schools that accounted for the participants in six consecutive finals from 1980 through 1985 went on to join other conferences--UAB (Great Midwest and C-USA), Old Dominion (Colonial), South Florida (Metro and C-USA) and Virginia Commonwealth (Metro and C-USA). Two-time champion Charlotte also left for the Metro and C-USA.

WEST COAST
The top two seeds didn't meet in the championship game until 2000. The most tragic moment in the history of any conference tournament occurred in the semifinals of the 1990 tourney at Loyola Marymount when Hank Gathers, the league's all-time scoring leader and a two-time tourney MVP, collapsed on his home court during the Lions' game with Portland. He died later that evening and the tournament was suspended. The Lions earned the NCAA Tournament bid because of their regular-season crown and advanced to the West Regional final behind the heroics of Bo Kimble, who was Gathers' longtime friend from Philadelphia.

WESTERN ATHLETIC
The tourney's biggest upset occurred in 1990 when No. 9 seed Air Force defeated No. 1 seed Colorado State in the quarterfinals, 58-51. Hawaii's Carl English, averaging 3.9 points per game as a freshman during the regular season, had a season-high 25 in a 78-72 overtime victory against host Tulsa in the 2001 final.