The AAC popped some big basketball news over the weekend with the format announcement of the 2014-15 season.
The biggest format change has to do with the AAC basketball tournament. In what was a Wednesday-Saturday event last season has turned into a Thursday-Sunday event this season. No doubt replacing the ACC title game which was moved to Saturday night. All 11 teams will participate in the tournament, with 3 games on Thursday, the quarterfinals on Friday, the semis on Saturday and the finals on Selection Sunday. The tournament will take place in Hartford, Connecticut at the XL Center March 12-15.
All the games will be televised on the ESPN networks. No specific home station was announced but it’s 2014, you know the drill. ESPNU, ESPN2, you should have them all by now.
The other change was a new format to deal with 11 teams. We had a perfect round robin a year ago in terms of scheduling since everyone played each other. This season there are 8 pairs of home and away opponents and two teams that play once, one at home, the other on the road.
Cincinnati’s schedule shakes down with the pair teams:
Central Florida
Connecticut
East Carolina
Houston
Memphis
Southern Methodist
Temple
Tulane
The Bearcats will host:
South Florida
The Bearcats will travel to:
Tulsa
I’ll paste the full pairs list at Run the Floor. Now is time for a little reaction.
I hate Sunday conference tournament championship games. If it were up to me, they wouldn’t exist at all. They are pointless in the sense that the selection committee doesn’t care about those games really and worry about other things. Those teams are already slotted and what happens, happens.
That being said, I know it wasn’t the league’s decision to move days for the championship. It was TV move. They don’t really have a choice if they want to air on ESPN. The Big 12 moved their conference title game to Saturday night. The ACC has moved their conference game to Saturday night. When you add in the smaller conference championship games that ESPN airs, there is simply not a place on ESPN or ESPN2 for the American. Someone had to get bumped and it’s the conference that gets bumped. Let’s face it, the nation doesn’t think much of the league at large. That’s why going out and winning and winning and winning last year was great for the league. UCF set a standard in football, UConn set the highest standard in basketball. It doesn’t cover up the black eyes that the league has received as a national punching bag for whatever reasons, but it’s a nice distraction. Without being in the Big Powerful and Almighty 5 conference picture, your league is going to get jerked around.
Just a few years ago, Cincinnati was playing Louisville in the conference tournament final in primetime in Madison Square Garden. It was no stretch to say then ‘enjoy the hell out of this because it doesn’t happen a lot’ but now, now is a time when you look back and really savor that for when Cincinnati is playing Tulsa for the American championship at 11 am in a half empty arena in Hartford.
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