[ OUR OPINION ]
Ruling will restore
big-time basketball
in islesA federal judge has given a major boost to college basketball in Hawaii by rejecting an NCAA decision that threatened to crush tournaments that brought marquee teams to the islands, along with national television coverage. Although the ruling is likely to be appealed, it should allow Hawaii universities to revive the tournaments in the 2004-'05 season.
THE ISSUE
A federal judge struck down an NCAA rule limiting college basketball teams' participation in tournaments partially exempted from schedule limits.
U.S. District Judge Edmund Sargus Jr. of Columbus, Ohio, found that the NCAA rule discouraging Division I basketball teams from playing in certain tournaments violated antitrust laws. The judge's decision restores a system that allowed teams to participate in the tournaments without causing havoc to the NCAA's 28-game ceiling on their season schedules.
The permanent injunction is not likely to be set aside during an appeal, which could take years, because of the financial repercussions if it were lifted. Tournament organizers can begin inviting the caliber of teams that could be relied upon to compete in such tournaments as the Rainbow Classic in the years prior to the NCAA rule. Tourism promoters should be able to restore college basketball as a vehicle for network television coverage of Hawaii during the winter months.
Under the old system, teams could play as many as four games in an NCAA-certified tournament and have them counted as only one game against their schedule. When the NCAA limited a school's participation to two such tournaments over a four-year period, perennially top-ranked teams such as Duke or Kansas had to decide whether to play in those tournaments or profit from several home games. Not surprisingly, they chose to stay at home, less appealing teams were booked for the tournaments and television networks lost interest.
"The only kind of high-majors (in tournaments) will be teams that don't draw well at home and struggle to schedule," Andy Katz of ESPN accurately predicted to the Star-Bulletin two years ago. "Teams that don't have that problem, like Kansas, they won't be coming."
Eleven of the 28 certified tournaments were canceled because of the NCAA's new policy, including the Hawaii Pacific Thanksgiving Shootout and Brigham Young-Hawaii's Pearl Harbor Classic , according to Bill Markovits, the plaintiffs' attorney. It threatened the future of the University of Hawaii's Rainbow Classic, which had been a major draw for top-ranked teams, and Chaminade University's Maui Classic. Sports Tours International, which stages the Maui tournament, was among the promoters that filed the lawsuit against the NCAA in Ohio, where one of the promoters is based.
Following the judge's decision, organizers scrambled to lure big-name schools to participate in tournaments scheduled at Las Vegas in the upcoming season, but Hawaii's tournament participants already have been chosen. Hawaii tournament organizers can begin work on fielding top-notch teams for next year.
