On Thursday afternoon I arrived in Atlantic City with eight college friends from George Washington University for the Atlantic 10 Tournament. The A-10 basketball conference, despite the suggestion that it might include just 10 teams, is made up of 14 colleges and universities that approximately .005 percent of ardent college basketball fans could name.
The league now stretches from Rhode Island to Charlotte with two Ohio schools and one Missouri school thrown in for good measure. Before my arrival on the East Coast for college at George Washington University, the only other A-10 schools that I knew played basketball in the conference were Xavier, Temple and UMass.
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| The site of this year's tournament? Atlantic City, N.J. (AP) |
Over my four years at GW, I became the worst student basketball manager in the history of collegiate sports and became pretty familiar with the other schools. I also experienced the other side of collegiate athletics, where small teams compete for media attention and perform outside of the limelight.
Growing up I was a Southeastern Conference fan and was used to each team receiving ample attention. During my freshman year GW went on the road to play at Texas Tech. I spent over an hour trying to figure out why I wasn't able to pick up the GW game on the radio in my dorm room. Several times I went from the top to the bottom on both AM and FM. Nothing.
In fact, due to my frustration my radio came very close to coming to rest nine stories below on 21st Street in Northwest Washington, D.C. It wasn't until the next day that I learned GW basketball's radio signal didn't work on GW's own campus. This completely floored me. Suddenly, I recognized the vast scope of Division I athletics.
For basketball, at least, the court was in no way level. The small minority of teams get 95 percent of coverage year after year. Nevertheless, over the course of four years in D.C., I became one of a small breed of GW basketball fans.
And now for six of the past nine years, I've traveled to watch the A-10 tourney in person. I have been to Philadelphia, Cincinnati, and now, for the first time ever, have arrived in Atlantic City. Let's be honest, after the reports from NBA All-Star weekend, even playing a smaller conference tournament in Atlantic City seems like a gamble.
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| Clay Travis is not a fan of cold weather. (AP) |
I know we all entertained visions of stumbling around the corner of a row of slot machines and seeing one of our players slumped over the one-armed bandit with an absent and lost gaze plastered upon his face, an empty Dixie cup of watered down vodka cranberry dangling lifelessly in his arm. The clock rapidly approaching dawn and all our hopes of making the NCAA Tournament slowly frittering away.
Actually, none of us arrived with much hope of GW making the tourney. We had all steeled ourselves to have a great time no matter what happened in the actual games. Even though GW arrived as the third seed with a bye alongside first seed Xavier, second seed UMass and fourth seed Rhode Island. If, by chance, GW could play a great game and slip by either UMass or Xavier, that would be great.
But mostly we were going to the A-10 tourney to have a good time. And, without further ado, here we go from Atlantic City with numbered DDT-style accompaniment.
1. The A-10 tourney started Wednesday. I have no first-hand knowledge of what happened in the four games because I wasn't there. Instead, I spent all day Wednesday cursing the fact that it was snowing in both Washington, D.C. and Philadelphia.
