Big West remains optimistic after NCAA maintains 25-game threshold

Jan. 25—The numbers haven't changed, but now the Big West Conference is confident the math will work out in its favor.

Three weeks ago, when the conference was seeing the majority of its scheduled basketball games canceled due to COVID-19, Commissioner Dan Butterly said the Big West would wait for an NCAA ruling on postseason eligibility requirements to reevaluate its policies. With teams playing significantly reduced schedules, the college basketball world wondered if the minimum number of Division I opponents required to make the NCAA Tournament would be reduced from 25; it was lowered to 13 last season.

Now, with no change to the minimum, the NCAA Convention has passed — but so too, the Big West hopes, have the worst of its COVID struggles.

"We are obviously hopeful — and somewhat optimistic — that the bulk of any cancellations are behind us and a large swath of teams will be at or above the 25 games," a conference spokesperson wrote in an email to The Californian.

With just one team of each gender — Cal Poly for the women, UC Santa Barbara for the men — forced to cancel games last week, it certainly appears the conference is on an upward trajectory.

That doesn't mean, however, that all teams are in the clear. Far from it. At Cal State Bakersfield, the men's team (6-7) has played 11 games against Division I opponents with 12 on the schedule; the women's team (1-10) has played 10 and has 12 left. To win the Big West tournament in March and earn an NCAA tournament spot, a team will have to play three or four games along the way, but under NCAA Bylaw 20.9.6.3.2 a tournament appears to count as just one extra game played, and that's how conference tournaments were treated last year.

Thankfully for CSUB, and other teams hit equally hard by COVID-19 like the UC Irvine men and UC Riverside women, the NCAA does plan to implement a waiver process "similar to the one used last year, with details still to be determined," a spokesperson confirmed, which the Big West expects to hear about in a week or so.

Last year's waiver guidelines hinged on a team's ability to demonstrate that after COVID-19 cancellations, "despite a good-faith effort, the team was unable to re-arrange its schedule to play the appropriate minimum number of contests against Division I opponents." That provision could be a bit of a sticking point, but the Big West has made some efforts to arrange replacement games, as when CSUB and Hawaii played twice last week.

There are few teams with comparable scheduling situations to CSUB currently. On the men's side, two of the other teams with just 11 Division I games played are in the Big West. Otherwise, they're hard to find: one team in a marginally worse position is the University of Maryland—Eastern Shore, with 11 Division I games played and 11 remaining. On the women's side, New Orleans has played nine games with 11 left.

The Big West spokesperson added that Butterly, who serves on the Division I Men's Basketball Oversight Committee, was "assured by multiple committee members and NCAA staff that The Big West will be ok and that there are many schools in worse 'games lost' situations."

There may be additional scheduling setbacks as the next six weeks of the season unfold. But with a waiver policy on the horizon, none of these canceled games matter as long as teams continue to make a "good-faith effort" to replace them.

Reporter Henry Greenstein can be reached at 661-395-7374. Follow him on Twitter: @HenryGreenstein.