I enjoy Roger Grossman’s weekly column. It’s too bad the comment section below the article (online) is so limited in numbers of characters available for a reply.
That compulsion to occasionally reply in greater length seems to lead me to the letter to the editor section.
I’m not going to research the process that led the IHSAA to use the blind draw for the basketball tournaments (and other sports for that matter), but I’m going to boldly draw a conclusion based on gut feel. The IHSAA, the governing body of interscholastic sports, has a very keen sense of one big thing – optimizing their share of the gate and concession revenue!
Come Saturday night, in this economy, with so many students working weekends, and only two teams left in a cavernous 7,300-seat arena, you might get 4,500 bottoms in the seats based on the enrollment size and interest among the sectional field. I wonder if the research the IHSAA conducted on gate revenue found that the blind draw gets an even greater gate revenue on the front end.
Perhaps a pre-championship matchup of the top two teams, something we want in our hearts to see Saturday night instead, gets even more gate revenue in the early rounds when almost every school and its fan base still has a horse in the race. Let’s face it, the two best teams tend to collide in the sectional whether it’s Tuesday, Friday or Saturday, so why not let dumb luck and a blind draw land this game when there are the most bottoms in the seats?
Either way, for the entire Elkhart sectional area (a.k.a. the NLC 4A tournament plus Elkhart Central), the sectional final is anticlimactic these days once your team is eliminated. The IHSAA knows it will still realize a little gate revenue from a few of its most ardent high school basketball fans not affiliated with the finalists, but that’s a small portion of the population in the arena on Saturday night.
I wonder if the IHSAA research concluded that the rest of the eliminated teams’ fan base has so much more to do these days on championship Saturday with such a robust economy. I believe the magic of sectional basketball is continually fading. Thanks to class basketball (which actually increased trophy inventories for smaller private schools) most 4A sectionals have turned into gussied up conference post-season tournaments with a few “special guests.”
Spare me your David and Goliath stories because those went away with the departure from the single tournament format (if you intend to use them as examples in a reply). Just go through history and do what I do; count stuff! Count the close games, count the watchable games, count the upsets, count the wins the underdog had in the ensuing round, count the attendance (if it’s available) among the last ten years of class sectional basketball!
The lopsided, unwatchable games are not as pervasive as they are among IHSAA sectional football state-wide games (exception – sectionals with two or more MIC or Duneland Conference teams), but it’s still noticeable.
The regional with its two-game, same-day format and the caliber of most of the teams that make it there make that Saturday the best ticket of the IHSAA basketball post season.
