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All-College Classic deserves a better fate
Published: 12/15/2012 9:20 PM
Last Modified: 12/15/2012 9:20 PM

I'm a big fan of mid-major and low-major college basketball.

For a 10-year stretch of my childhood, I never missed a Lamar University men's basketball home game. Lamar started the coaching career of future Oklahoma legend Billy Tubbs and was an NCAA Tournament Cinderella before the term became vogue.

I remember what a big deal it was for Lamar to get an invitation to the All-College Classic and challenge some of the best big-time basketball programs in the country.

With that memory in mind, it's sad to see what has become of the once great event.

I made the trip to Oklahoma City on Saturday for this year's game, a single contest between Oklahoma and Texas A&M at Chesapeake Arena.

The crowd wasn't as bad as I thought it might be considering only a few thousand fans watched these same two teams play as conference rivals in Norman last March.

Still, there couldn't have been more than 4,000 fans in the building.

Our own Guerin Emig chronicled the struggles of the All-College Classic in Saturday's paper. You can read the story here.

As the story indicates, there aren't a lot of good solutions. But the problems facing the All-College Classic aren't rare in the college basketball world.

Despite the unprecedented popularity of the NCAA basketball tournament, it's getting harder for your average college basketball team to draw a crowd. Attendance is down around Division I basketball by an average of about 400 fans per game over the last 20 years.

Television is a double-edged sword. The medium gives exposure to increase the game's overall popularity and provides the revenue that allows the games to continue. But at the same time, all of the televised basketball has overexposed the game and made it harder for all but the most elite and most successful teams to draw a crowd.

Thirty years ago, if you wanted to feed your college basketball fix without a lot of travel, you would head over to Tulsa or Oral Roberts and watch a game. But today, you can go to the Reynolds Center for a Tulsa-Houston game or you can stay home and watch Duke-North Carolina on ESPN.

Unless you're a diehard TU fan or the Hurricane is having a great season, you probably stay at home.

The All-College Classic faces those issues and more given its December spot on the calendar and the competition with so many made-for-TV pre-conference tournaments.

Maybe the Oklahoma City Thunder, which has also played a role in the diminishing interest in state college basketball, could put its stamp on a solution that would save the All-College Classic.

Hopefully, the All-College can continue to be remembered fondly rather than experience a fond farewell.

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Blue&Gold (last month)

The solution is making it a 4 team event pitting Tulsa, ORU, OkState, and OU in a 2 might event. You alternate between OKC amd Tulsa from yr to yr. One night, Tulsa plays OU and ORU plays OkState, the next the opponents change, TU plays OkSt, ORU plays OU. When you play in OKC, OkSt and OU wear the home jerseys, in Tulsa, OU and ORU wear home jerseys. Do the games before students go home to get that atmosphere, maybe the first weekend of December. Win/win for the state.

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Tulsa World Sports Editor Michael Peters has nearly 20 years of daily newspaper experience. A 1993 graduate of Texas A&M, he worked at papers in Bryan-College Station, Texas, Beaumont, Texas, and Galveston, Texas, before joining the Houston Chronicle as High School Sports Editor in 2008. While in Houston, he coordinated coverage of the 2008 Texas Class 5A state football championships and the 2011 NCAA Men's Final Four.

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