MAAC commissioner: Don't mess with the NCAA Tournament
LACEY – Rich Ensor’s first act as commissioner of the Metro Atlantic Athletic Conference was to buy each of the league’s athletic directors a computer.
“I said, ‘This is how you’re going to communicate with me,’” he recalled.
It was 1988. Ronald Reagan was in the White House. College basketball was fresh off a series of major changes, introducing the shot clock, 3-pointer and 64-team NCAA Tournament. The eight-team MAAC was highlighted by La Salle, which was rising to national hardwood prominence with the eventual best player in the sport, Lionel Simmons. None of the conference’s games were televised. If you wanted to see them, you had to show up at the gym.
“It was such a different world,” Ensor said Thursday from his home in the Lanoka Harbor section of Lacey, where he was hosting a pool party for the MAAC staff (he’s got a really nice inground pool). He’s an Ocean County lifer, having grown up in Brick and attended St Joseph High School in Toms River (now Donovan Catholic), where he served as manager of the football team.
More:After 17 years, Holloway inspires Seton Hall's J.R. Morris to go back to school
Now 69, Ensor is embarking on his 35th and final year as MAAC commissioner, making him the longest-tenured head of a conference in NCAA Division I history. The league is coming off a seminal moment; Saint Peter’s reaching the Elite Eight of March Madness was a sort of valedictory for Ensor, who attended college and broke into the business there.
“Nobody gives you a manual on how to be a commissioner,” he said. “I had no clue what I was getting into, but the key thing for me is I was always comfortable repping these schools.”
Is he comfortable with the direction of college sports as the landscape undergoes seismic changes? Here’s what he had to say on some hot-button topics.
On the Big Dance's future
SEC commissioner Greg Sankey made waves recently by suggesting major changes to the March Madness format. Ensor has known Sankey, who hails from upstate New York and once helmed a mid-major conference, for decades.
“He says things like that because he’s got people he’s got to deal with,” Ensor said. “He doesn’t want to mess with the basketball tournament.”
As Ensor pointed out, what really irked Sankey was perceived slights against the SEC by the NCAA baseball tournament selection committee (college baseball is huge in the southeast). The inference: rattle your saber about the basketball tournament, get your way with baseball tournament expansion.
“It’s a leverage thing,” Ensor said.
With the Big Dance, “there’s always some coach who thinks he should be in with his sub-.500 conference record, that he finished eighth in his conference but should be in the tournament over a Saint Peter’s,” Ensor said, and the Peacocks’ run served as the ultimate rebuttal.
“We bring a lot of value to that tournament,” Ensor said. “Saint Peter’s was the biggest story of the year. (High-major commissioners) hear that from their media partners, by the way -- ‘Don’t mess with something that’s working really well.' These schools keep it interesting, otherwise those first couple of rounds would be boring.”
Transfer-rule changes
Within weeks of Saint Peter’s galvanizing the nation, Shaheen Holloway and his coaching staff went to Seton Hall and the top seven players transferred out. It was an unprecedented dismantling made possible by the elimination of the sit-out year for transfers.
“That’s the reality of what we’re dealing with right now,” Ensor said. “We’re damaged by it in some cases, but we benefit by it in others. Is Saint Peter’s benefiting? No. But those kids earned the opportunity to play at a higher level. I see the pros and cons.”
One big con?
“I would put some more guardrails around it as far as academics,” Ensor said. “People transferring too many times are going to lose credits and they’re not going to graduate. We’re probably two years away from seeing what the result of all this is.”
Conference realignment
The eight-team MAAC Ensor inherited included La Salle, Army, Holy Cross and Fordham (all now elsewhere). Currently it’s 11 teams, with Monmouth leaving for the Colonial Athletic Association and Mount Saint Mary’s coming in.
“Am I sad Monmouth leaves? Yes, because they’re a really good school and by the way, I could go to their games on the way home from work (at MAAC headquarters in Edison),” Ensor said with a chuckle. “But it was a football decision. I understand it.”
Realignment is part of the fabric, he said, and has been since the Big East formed by raiding the ECAC in the late 1970s. The MAAC has poached and been poached.
“I think we’ll probably get to 12 (schools), and it could be (decided) this year,” Ensor said. “We’re talking to a couple of schools.”
The NCAA's long-term stability
“Since the day I got into this business, there’s always been a threat that the majors are going to leave,” Ensor said. He asserts that power conferences “get everything that they want anyway." Why would they take on the responsibility of organizing 26 NCAA championship events -- each a massive logistical undertaking?
“They’re going to run ice hockey? Two-thirds of ice hockey schools aren’t majors,” he said. “They’re going to run lacrosse? They don’t want to do all that. The NCAA serves its purpose. Take your football out and do whatever you want with it -- professionalize it, because that’s where it’s headed -- and leave the rest of it alone, with basketball being a key cornerstone.”
'Some Jersey attitude'
Dismiss Ensor’s insights at your own risk. In a field that churns through executives, he’s survived this long because he can read a room. In 1988 he inked the MAAC to its first TV deal, getting eight men’s basketball games on SportsChannel; this past year 646 MAAC sporting events appeared on various ESPN platforms. The league sponsors 24 sports now, 11 more than it did in 1988, with automatic NCAA Tournament qualifiers in 15 of them (as opposed to two when he started). He’s shepherded a series of non-conference events for MAAC basketball teams, including showcases in Orlando, Ireland and England.
The MAAC’s been good to him, too. Three of his children attended MAAC colleges tuition-free (a fourth went to MIT and became a nuclear engineer), and the league’s presidents trust him.
“They’ve given me a lot of freedom over the years,” he said.
His tenure was crystalized in March. After Saint Peter’s stunned Kentucky, Holloway was asked how his team avoided being pushed around physically.
“You think we're worried about guys trying to muscle us?” Holloway said, referencing his roster's metro-area roots. “We do that.”
It rang familiar to Ensor after 34 years as a mid-major advocate who was awfully tough to muscle.
“I’m a Shore boy with some Jersey attitude,” he said. “I don’t look for trouble, but I don’t let anybody pound on the MAAC.”
Jerry Carino has covered the New Jersey sports scene since 1996 and the college basketball beat since 2003. He is an Associated Press Top 25 voter. Contact him at jcarino@gannettnj.com.
This article originally appeared on Asbury Park Press: MAAC commissioner Rich Ensor: Don't mess with the NCAA Tournament
