UCI Doesn't Make The NCAA Basketball Tournament (Of Course)

So Matt Cutts has some alma mater favorites in the upcoming NCAA basketball tournament. That's fine, Matt. I'm sure my UCI Anteaters can take out any basketballs that your pesky little schools can toss out .... oh, wait. UCI didn't make the tournament. It never makes the tournament. Sigh.

I went to a university without a football team. It'll never have a football team. It hardly made an impact on me. I'm not a big sports fan. But I once when with a friend to a football game at his college and wow, what an impact on the university spirit.

Without a football team, basketball stepped up as UCI's big sport. It had to carry our spirits, our hopes and dreams. When I was there from 1983-1988, it always seemed to disappoint.

First, it used be played in Crawford Hall. Crawford Hall, I kid you not, was only slightly larger than some high school auditoriums. It was a joke -- and one reason that the students agreed to tax themselves and fund the Bren Events Center. It got named the Bren Events Center after Donald Bren, who at the time was the chairman of the Irvine Company. Think Caleb as super-rich guy who ran the Newport Group in The OC, and you have the idea of Donald Bren -- at least in stature, power and money for the local area.

When the Bren was built, it was amazing. It was a real arena, with fold down seats, snack bars, big scoreboards. Excitement city! And even more so because UCI was on its winningest basketball streak ever. It beat powerhouse UNLV twice, if I recall -- away and at home.

Now UCI isn't in the NCAA Division I, so we don't automatically get a chance to go into the NCAA tournament, to my understanding. From what I get from Wikipedia, potentially, we could get added if we were like super deserving. Maybe. I'm a sports moron, if you haven't figured that out by now. I do know in the year of our big new events center, we made it to the NIT tournament. It may have been the first time we went to a national tournament. I can't tell for certain, because the UCI Basketball site is pretty lame on listing this stuff out (not to mention being lame for every page title being "UC Irvine Athletics. Really, I'm ashamed. I went to school here?). Wikipedia is oddly more informative. The Anteaters have been to the NIT twice and the Division II NCAA Tournament twice, it says -- those dates aren't given.

So, I think the year of the Bren was the first national tournament. And we were so excited. And we lost, naturally. I have a great memory of this, because I listened within the studio of the campus radio station, KUCI. My friend was doing the engineering. And when we lost, I slammed my fist down on the table as the commentator said something like "It's all over." That jostled the phone. We lost the connection and started broadcasting a dial tone. Heh. Perhaps appropriate, though I did make me win a mock "Best Engineering Award" when the station had its end of the year party.

So good luck Matt -- good luck to everyone who has a school that gets to compete in the big tournament. UCI never seems to get far, and I expect will never change. Then again, I never though the Orange County Angels (how nice if they could actually be called that) would win anything, and they took the World Series not too long ago. A boy can dream, even a sports moron boy.

Pepperdine didn't make the NCAA Tournament, either. And probably never will again, since Gonzaga's become such a powerhouse.

Kinda funny that we both went to schools with no football team. Didn't we also both work for newspapers in S. California, too? And didn't you point out that we both wrote a traffic column?

Scary, Danny. Scary....

Comment by Matt McGee | March 13, 2007 1:59 AM

For what it's worth and for the record, UCI IS an NCAA Division I school; the Anteaters moved up from Division II sometime in the '70s. I thought we covered this pretty well in many a campus newspaper story, Danny :-)

Other than that, you captured our school's basketball futility very well.

To make the NCAA tournament, UCI would have to win the Big West Conference tournament. Of course, winning that usually entitles a team to a quick, humiliating exit from the national stage.... See Long Beach State's 121-86 loss to Tennessee last week.

Comment by Martin | March 19, 2007 5:02 PM

Nice recollection of UCI basketball memories. I'm glad you mentioned your amazing broadcast engineering skillz, too.

Comment by Kenster999 | March 26, 2007 10:43 PM

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