Consolation Road To Nowhere

Posted by Daniel Popko

It’s a sad day for Boston College basketball. The NCAA tournament is just around the corner, and the Eagles can’t boast a team in either the men’s or women’s fields. Worse than that, there is no NIT. No CBI. Heck, the collegeinsider.com tournament didn’t even bother sniffing around Conte Forum.

Perhaps what’s most surprising is neither team was without options. Al Skinner refused to put his team in anything below the NIT. For that reason, Rakim Sanders will be free the travel – excuse me, jab step (or was that a crab dribble?) – wherever he wishes instead of hosting the likes of Fairfield in the CBI.

Sylvia Crawley and the Lady Eagles flat-out rejected an NIT birth despite the fact they could quite possibly win the tournament without leaving Chestnut Hill. The locker room was apparently divided over their participation, and rather than play as a team divided, they will sit as a team united.

I generally support playing as much competitive basketball as possible. An NIT or CBI title might not be a National Championship, but you have the chance to win some hardware and be one of only a few teams (two for women, four for men) that can say you ended the year with a W.

When it comes to Skinner and Crawley, I actually agree with their decision. One hundred percent. I may not have said that much about Skinner much this year, but for these teams, they fell well short of expectations, and they didn’t deserve to keep going.

If you watched BC basketball this year, you saw a pair of enigmas. For every high, there were more than a few lows. If the teams didn’t feel they were worthy of a second or third-rate tournament, good for them.What makes tournaments like the NIT great theatre isn’t the BC’s that don’t deserve any recognition for failing to do what they were supposed to.

The NIT is for the teams like Stony Brook. The Seawolves have only been one Division I team since 1999 and have never been in the postseason. They lost to BU – and not even in Hockey, which is depressing – in the America East tournament, but were granted an NIT berth thanks to their regular season title.

Stony Brook may have been given an eight seed, the lowest the NIT has to offer, but thanks to Cirque Du Soleil booting top-seeded Illinois from Assembly Hall, the school from the north shore of Long Island got to pack out their 5,000-seat gym for a postseason game Wednesday.

I’ve been there. It bears a strong resemblance to a high school gym in that your high school gym may actually look more imposing. But they were pumped to have this opportunity for the first time ever. They sold out and were louder than every non-Duke crowd BC has seen. Because of that, an American East state school pushed a team that Skinner would likely have lost to by double digits. Then again, that just means they could’ve won by 40.

Do you think Conte Forum would see that kind of support for a postseason tournament that is ultimately meaningless? I didn’t think so. Would they see even reach half capacity? The women’s team hosted an NIT Final Four game last season, and I bet most students reading this didn’t even know that.

Unable to get their goal, the Eagles didn’t want the token “set of steak knives” that comes as the door prize. As much as I’d like to see another few games of Ayla Brown or Tyler Roche, I can’t say I want a consolation road to nowhere, either.