Go (North) West, College Basketball

Lamenting the death of the truly-enjoyable MTE.

I hadn’t planned on much basketball coverage here for a couple reasons: for one, the internet is a dying place, and, for two, that’s exacerbating the steady death of Off Tackle Empire dot blogspot dot biz.

BUT!

Looking over the (limited) options for basketball on this last snowy Saturday—one, Bellarmine at Northern Illinois, had been cancelled thanks to the foot of snow whipping across the Midwest—I noticed a game that made me say Zut alors!

Somewhat amazingly, this is the third year the Northern Classic has existed—the first two, in 2022 and 2023, featured a number of D-I mid-majors…and also Oregon, thanks to Montrealer Quincy Guerrier?

It does, however, force me to revisit one of my great passion projects: why can we play basketball in Montreal, but not revive the Great Alaska Shootout?

Begun in 1978, the Great Alaska Shootout brought an eight-team field to the campus of the University of Alaska-Anchorage, featuring a who’s who of high-major programs like Kentucky, North Carolina, Louisville, Marquette, Arkansas, Kansas, UNLV, and Iowa among its early-year finalists. In 1985, ESPN began broadcasting the Shootout, with UNC taking advantage of the last shot clock-less year to Four Corners UNLV to death, 65-60, in the title; the next year, George Raveling (RIP) took the Hawkeyes’ up-tempo, pressing attack to Anchorage, thumping Northeastern in the title game, 103-80. Subsequent Big Ten titleists included Michigan State (1989 over Kansas, 73-68), Purdue (1993, 88-73 over Portland), and Minnesota (1994, 79-74 over BYU), with Iowa finishing runner-up in 1995 to Duke and Purdue falling to UNC in 1997 before returning to capture the crown over Duke, 78-68, in 2003.

The 1998 final, between Cincinnati and Duke, featured this iconic walk-off from Kenyon Martin:

It was a great, interesting, beloved tournament, and then it fell victim to the proliferation of warm-weather tournaments across North America in the early 2010s.

As every Tom, Dick, and tertiary Florida convention center realized it could host its own multi-team event (MTE) and attract a couple Power-6 programs to anchor the field, the Great Alaska Shootout became an after-thought. Fans of college basketball (and I count myself as one) no doubt loved the parade of mid-major winners—Murray State in 2011, Charlotte in 2012, Harvard in 2013, Colorado State in 2014, Middle Tennessee in 2015, Iona in 2016, and Central Michigan in 2017—but those schools didn’t bring the fanbases or interest to Anchorage that the Shootout had known in the 1990s. Increasingly isolated to CBS Sports Network, the Shootout lost the financial support of its host institution, UAA, and announced in 2017 that that year’s iteration would be its last.

It’s worth noting that the Shootout does live on: in 2022 the Arctic Slope Regional Corporation and ConocoPhillips Alaska revived the women’s iteration of the tournament—itself originally held in 1980—which is now on its fourth consecutive year of operation and, just last Saturday, saw the UC Irvine Anteaters knock off the St. Thomas Tommies in the final.

Subsequent localities have tried similar events north of the lower 48: in 2018 the Vancouver Convention Centre hosted the four-team Vancouver Showcase, which Minnesota won by knocking off Texas A&M and Santa Clara (Washington took third), but the event folded after that year, moving to the nearby University of Victoria, which hosted an eight-team, women’s-only tournament in 2019.

A successor to the non-contiguous, even international flavor (flavour?) of the Great Alaska Shootout and sister events like the Vancouver Showcase and Northern Classic, was the Basketball Hall of Fame Belfast Classic, a 2017-18 tournament held in Belfast, Ireland*.* I said what I said.

The 2017 iteration, which I’m fairly certain I profiled at some point on OTE, featured Towson, La Salle, Manhattan, and Holy Cross in a four-team bracket; the 2018 follow-up brought eight teams across the Atlantic, including San Francisco and 21st-ranked Buffalo, splitting the teams into two brackets named Goliath and Samson, for the cranes that worked on the Titanic in Belfast Harbor. Broadcast on CBS Sports Network, the Belfast tournament featured every sicko’s dream—late-night and early-morning basketball—but every executive’s nightmare: limited attendance and low ratings. The tournament’s page still promises “Bigger and Better Classic News Coming Soon,” linking to a press release from something called Inspirus Sports promising a 2020 series of events featuring four Division I teams in 2020 “and eight in each year after.”

COVID and the realities of college sports financials, more than likely, scuttled those dreams.

Men’s events like the Puerto Rico Tip-Off (2007-2017) and the San Juan Shootout* (still going as a women’s invitational—free to enter, no ticket needed!—1989-present) have similarly fallen by the wayside. Now, today, if college basketball heads over the ocean at all, if it’s not to the Maui Invitational or the Outrigger Rainbow Classic, it’s to a resort ballroom in Cancun or the Bahamas—and, increasingly, Power-5 programs are forgoing those tournaments in favor of contrived, made-for-TV, one-off events called the “Champions Classic” or the “Classic of Champions” or the “Classic Champions Invitational Brought to You by EA Sports.”* Northwestern lost two opening-round games here, 67-58 to Kent State in 2000 and 66-65 to Tennessee Tech in 2006.

I don’t have an answer for this. What I do know is that I don’t need more of the Players Era Festival, the NIL-tinged college basketball tournament supposedly “for the players” that leaves the players to scrap for a slim chance at a million-dollar pot while subjecting them to last-minute scheduling and after-midnight tip-offs.

In fact, I’m really just hoping some enterprising, capable, and compensated writer like Rodger Sherman—who I know could do an amazing oral history of Northwestern’s showing at the 1999 Hoop & Quill Invitational in St. Louis, at which the ‘Cats lost their opening-round game to Evansville by a final score of 48-26, featuring leading scorer Ben Johnson (yes, that one) with nine points—will pick up the mantle of chasing down those sources and rehashing just how awful the end of the Kevin O’Neill Era was in Evanston.

What I do hope, though, is that someday there’s a way to make a higher-stakes MTE happen somewhere overseas—in a country that’s not Saudi Arabia, Players Era Festival!!!—that’s interesting to fans, players, viewers, and local communities alike. In an era in which we supposedly crave authenticity in sports and life amid the creep of artificial intelligence, vapid online influencers, and crass commercialization and enshittification of everything we hold dear, tournaments like the Great Alaska Shootout remind us of what college sports once—even just kind of—were.

I hope that someday we get the chance to care about them again.