OKLAHOMA CITY ? If you’re wondering why the NCAA Tournament venue in downtown Oklahoma City is known as the Ford Center, I’ll give you a clue.
On display in the northwest lobby is a shiny, white F350 V8 Turbo Diesel Lariat Super Duty king cab pickup truck. Did that give it away? Yeah, you knew Chrysler and General Motors didn’t manufacture that brand of muscle truck.
What you may not know, however, is why the host of this NCAA Tournament is the Big 12 Conference and not nearby Oklahoma University.
The Sooners were supposed to play host and earn the $100,000 or so for taking care of all the administrative details involved in bringing eight schools into one city.
Then two years ago, the NCAA legislated a pod system as a way of rewarding high seeds by allowing them to play early games as close to campus as possible. At the same time, the NCAA ruled a school could not be sent to a site where it was the designated host.
“Right away it was apparent to us,” OU athletic director Joe Castiglione told me, “that we would get caught in an unintended consequence of the new rule.”
Let me backtrack. Oklahoma was supposed to play host to this regional in 2001, but when OU officials learned the Ford Center would not be completed until the summer of 2002, an extension was granted.
“We didn’t want to play in the old building,” Castiglione said.
The old building was known as The Myriad and was the site of KU’s stunning 80-75 second-round loss to Rhode Island in 1998. By the way, as the Ford Center was being constructed The Myriad, located next door, was converted into a convention center.
Anyway, back to Oklahoma’s potential exclusion for playing tourney host.
“I could see the NCAA sending Tulsa or Oklahoma State here and us having a higher seed and being sent somewhere else,” Castiglione said. “Our fans would be screaming.”
So Castiglione petitioned the NCAA for a waiver. Answer: Sorry, Joe. Then the OU athletic director wrote to Indianapolis headquarters and asked if the good fathers would allow OU to transfer its host duties to someone else. Answer: OK, Joe.
“The only real choice was the Big 12 Conference,” Castiglione said. “They’d done it in Kansas City a couple of years ago.”
The Big 12 was tapped, the NCAA agreed and Castiglione caught some flak.
“Tim Allen is still mad at me,” Castiglione said with a laugh.
Allen is the Big 12 associate commissioner who inherited the job of tournament director. Normally, that duty would fall to conference commissioner Kevin Weiberg, but Weiberg is a member of the NCAA Men’s Division One Basketball Committee and can’t do both.
I caught up with Allen in the media room at halftime of Thursday night’s Memphis-Arizona State game and, sure enough, he’s still mad at Castiglione.
“But I hate him a little bit less every day,” Allen said. “I’ll love him again on Monday.”
In the meantime, Castiglione’s only job is to maintain visibility for the OU faithful at the Ford Center while wondering why the NCAA will not allow a team to participate at a site where it is the official host.
“I don’t really see how an institution can have an advantage,” Castiglione said. “There’s really nothing we can do to gain an advantage.”
Actually, there is one thing. OU could provide all the scorers and statisticians, and that could be considered an edge in light of what happened in the Oklahoma-Texas Tech game earlier this year in nearby Norman. Replays showed the game clock didn’t start until well after OU’s Hollis Price touched the ball in the waning seconds on the way to scoring a goal that enabled the Sooners to maintain their homecourt win streak. The gaffe was so blatant Tech coach Bob Knight lobbied for OU to forfeit the victory.
That didn’t happen, but it’s worth noting not a single OU statistician or scorer is working at this tournament.
