By Bob Hertzel
MORGANTOWN — Bob Huggins talks the way his teams play defense – in your face.
And Friday, a day before his West Virginia Mountaineers were to play Seton Hall at the Coliseum, he was in a full-court press.
Given an opening when someone asked him if he thought the NCAA Tournament should be expanded from its current 65-team format, Huggins offered his own solution and, in the process, accused the NCAA and the conferences of “stealing all the money” from the schools.
His solution was revolutionary and his accusations necessary, if for no other reasons than to draw attention to what is going on in college basketball today.
First for Huggins’ idea of how to make the game at its best.
“We ought to do what football does and go to a Division 1-A and 1-AA,” he said.
At present there are 334 teams in Division 1, ranging from the Special Ks — Kentucky and Kansas — who are both 24-1 to poor, poor Marist, who is 1-25.
As far as the NCAA is concerned, they are all equals.
Huggins knows they are not, not in facilities, not in recruiting, not in philosophy.
What he would like to do is take the top 110 and make them Division-1A, as football does.
“If they want to be Division 1-A, they would have to make the commitment to be big time,” Huggins said.
That includes all the trappings that you find at the schools in the power conferences. No offense, but this is about playing at the highest level of college basketball.
“Division 1-A teams could still play Division 1-AA teams, just like they do in football,” Huggins said. “But they would have have their own tournament.”
And if Huggins has his way, all 110 or so teams would be put into this super NCAA Tournament.
To be honest, it seems rather unmanageable and would certainly leave the regular season with virtually no meaning, nor would there be a need other than financial to hold conference tournaments, but the idea has its proponents.
Personally, I’m not sure that this bigger-is-better approach is the right one, for there is a certain charm in the NCAA Tournament that helps make it college athletics greatest show when you can have Princeton taking Georgetown down to the wire or a George Mason making a run into the Final Four.
What they have now works all too well, both in attendance and television ratings, while it gives teams in the lower divisions a major stage in March.
In the end, they always seem to wind up with pretty close to the right team as champion, one that comes from a major conference with a high national ranking and showcase players.
But certainly Huggins has a right to his feelings on this and as respected as he is among his peers he deserves to have them aired, maybe even voted upon by the body that is the NCAA.
Getting it past the NCAA might be quite a trick, however, for if what Huggins says about that group is true they have absolutely no incentive to change.
The NCAA says its revenue for the 2008-09 year was $661,000,000 and that it distributed to Division 1 members $451,000,000. That is only $1.25 million per school and says that $210,000,000 remain with the NCAA.
According to Huggins, more than 90 percent of that revenue comes from college basketball and its tournament.
Huggins believes the university presidents are letting the NCAA get away with robbery.
“They are robbing them,” Huggins said point blank. “What do they do with the money? No one can figure it out.”
When asked if Huggins had some idea of where the $210 million or so went, Huggins looked perplexed.
“I don’t know. I know Walter Byers had a hell of a farm,” he said, referring to former NCAA President Walter Byers.
Huggins believes if the power schools were to have their own tournament, they could collect a larger cut of the pie and bring their presidents money more reflective of their contribution to the package.
E-mail Bob Hertzel at bhertzel@hotmail.com.
