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Thursday, March 18, 2010

NCAA, NIT, etc., Open Thread

It looks like another year of boring uniformity on the NCAA front...

UPDATE: Via Uni Watch Blog, here's a time-lapse video of the Energy Solutions Arena floor being converted from the Utah Jazz hardwood to the NCAA's.

10 comments:

  1. I was wondering if you were going to write about the NCAA floors. Honestly, there's nothing to write about. I hate their setup. For starters, I've always thought that you should have color in the key (do they even call that area "the paint" anymore?). Hey, I would even be happy if they just changed up the color in the semicircle a bit-- maybe make Oklahoma City orange, or Milwaukee green. Or even make different colors for different years. But no, it's always the same boring NCAA blue.

    Maybe I'm overly weird, but I used to really enjoy watching the tournament to see the different venues. It really felt like college basketball. This feels like every game is the same, played in a sterile arena with more than a few empty seats.

    /rant

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  2. I agree, its horrible. All the sites just blend together, nothing stands out. Its a boring look. If the NCAA wants to make new courts, fine, no problem with that. But paint each one different. I can't imagine Providence University is happy to have the tourny on their home court, but there logo no where to be found and no one even knows the games are there.

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  3. every game looks the exact same, ncaa has completely branded this to look the exact way they wanted. theyve taken it over. if you dont know the teams you cant tell where the game is even being played. they dont just change the court either- its the whole arena. they have made everything the same (cant think of the vocab word...)

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  4. You're not weird, Brian. I used to love seeing the different courts of the various venues and their individuality. Dayton's home red in the paint with "A10" in the middle, George Mason's green lanes within the old Capital Centre in Washington,D.C., and the burnt orange all over the building in the old Frank Irwin Special Events Center in Austin. I guess we'll never see the tournament sites with their individual courts anymore. The NCAA has gone gestapo with it's drab wooden floors with no design whatsoever. Not only that, but they seem to have hijacked even the basket supports; they're all the same structure. It really does give the tournament a completely un-inviting feel. I don't know about all of you, but I hate the "POD" system as well where you have a team playing in the West bracket, but the first and second round sites are in Philadelphia or the Meadowlands. This makes no sense. Please give me back the days when each site started with 8 teams and finished with 2 by the end of the weekend; the same 2 teams that would face each other in the sweet sixteen. That gave it a much more tournament feel and was easier to follow, and just made sense. Now, you have a venue hosting teams from as many as 3 separate regions. Dumb.

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  5. Finally, someone who feels the same way I do about the NCAA courts. I think it's awful. As mentioned above by other posters, there is no longer any identity to any of the courts/venues, especially when watching the game on TV. Cornell is playing in the Carrier Dome vs. Kentucky tonight and one of its players, commenting on how the Dome looks nothing like it did when they played Syracuse there, said something to the effect that "it looks just like Jacksonville (where they played in the first two round), only bigger." Wow, great memories being built when the players don't even know what city they're in!!

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  6. I absolutely agree with everyone on here, the courts look so boring and yeah why not put actual paint in the "paint". It's so stupid, like everyone else here seeing the different court designs gave you an idea of where it was at, plus it was just cool seeing all the different courts. Oh well, maybe someday they will realize that the actual people who watch the tournament liked it better the old way, that will be the same day college football goes to a playoff, NEVER

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  7. Can someone tell me how the NCAA changes the host courts? Do they put down something like a portable court,and if so how is that done? It seems like a lot of trouble.

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  8. As seen in the linked time-lapse video, it appears that the arena's floor for its existing tenant (e.g., NBA or college team) is disassembled and stored away, and a completely new NCAA court is set down in its place.

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y8wsI3KfT9c

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  9. wow thanks for posting video, alan, I had no idea all the work that goes into this, but I must say, I agree with the majority of posts here, why not just keep the host areana court the way it should be?

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  10. Really the best way I could tell where the game was being played in years past was the court had the logo of the host school. This mess started back in 1986 when the NCAA decided to have a special floor for the Final 4 and now every game, including the Final 4 games, has the vanilla look. Yuk!!

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