Next week’s Big Sky Conference basketball tournaments will be the last for Southern Utah, which is leaving the league in July for the WAC in a move the school announced 14 months ago.

That will leave the Big Sky with 10 full members and necessitates at least some change to the basketball tournament format starting in 2023.

The Big Sky has staged an all-comers, neutral-site basketball tournament since 2016. It began as a 12-team field with the top four teams from the regular season receiving a bye to the quarterfinals. When North Dakota departed in 2018, a first-round game was eliminated and a fifth team now byes into the quarterfinals.

“The change of least resistance,” Big Sky deputy commissioner Dan Satter told the Standard-Examiner. “That would be the default way of changing it, essentially.”

While technically an option again — eliminating another first-round game and handing a bye to a sixth team — the time spent discussing the bracket format, TV windows and more indicates there’s an appetite to make more significant changes.

And, it’s possible such changes could be finalized next week when school presidents meet in Boise during the 2022 tournament.

“With the membership change, the Big Sky is using that opportunity to explore all parts of it — the bracket, the dates, and other ways to structure it to continue to build it,” Satter said. “The student-athlete experience, the competition, the exposure, the fan experience. A lot of good, important layers.”

As a foundation, it’s important to understand the all-comers format and neutral site are not on the table as potential changes. The men’s and women’s tournaments are contracted to remain in Boise through 2026 and, Satter said, the all-comers field is part of that contract with Idaho Central Arena, the city, and the Boise Convention and Visitor’s Bureau.

The ability to plan ahead months, not days, in advance, and give athletes at all schools the chance to compete in the tournament are things schools and the conference have found beneficial, and there’s a pretty solid consensus around the league in support of the neutral-site championship, he said.

Beyond that, though, the item that’s seemingly at the top of the list to consider: formatting the bracket in a way that better rewards regular-season success.

Satter said those discussions began when the league walked coaches through “a bunch of different brackets” in a preseason head coaches meeting last fall.

From there, the conference’s basketball committee — comprised of three athletic directors and two senior women administrators from member schools — has collected feedback from men’s and women’s coaches, athletic directors, and partners in Boise and at ESPN in the past several months in hopes of fashioning an official recommendation to filter through the Big Sky’s governance process. Any recommendation from that committee would move to a vote by athletic directors, who decide whether to forward the committee’s recommendation to the presidents’ council for a final vote.

Those groups have also bandied about the possibility of trying to obtain better TV coverage with ESPN if, for example, the tournaments could be scheduled to conclude on different days than they currently do.

In recent years, the tournament was carried on the Pluto TV streaming platform, with the men’s championship game airing on ESPNU. This year, with the Big Sky’s new deal with ESPN, the streaming components move to ESPN+. But the women’s title game remains off linear TV, according to the official bracket posted to the Big Sky’s website, and the men’s championship is still on ESPNU.

ESPN and ESPN2 are carried in about 83.5 million homes, according to a 2020 report from the Sports Business Journal, but ESPNU is available in about 61.5 million homes. Previous iterations of the men’s tournament included the championship being decided on a Tuesday and aired on ESPN2.

“I think there was an appetite, now that we have a more extensive ESPN relationship, to see if that could be leveraged in any way to get more linear TV coverage for our tournament,” Satter said.

Also under consideration: if such changes might lead to better fan attendance and hotel rentals, and if it could improve the overall health of the event.

“How do we be good partners but also do what’s best for our schools?” Satter said.

Down to the nitty-gritty, the combined men’s and women’s tournaments are shrinking from a total of 22 teams and 20 games, to 20 teams and 18 games starting next year. The current format has one day, Wednesday, with a total of five games. That means the men’s first round begins that day at 9:30 a.m.

“Playing as early as you do that first game on Wednesday isn’t ideal. So if there’s a way to avoid having a day with five games, that was something that was on everybody’s mind from the angle of the student-athlete experience,” Satter said.

The current format also stages the championship games on different days (1 p.m. Friday for the women, 6 p.m. Saturday for the men). Since the neutral-site format began in 2016, the idea of both championships being decided on the same day has been on the wish list.

“If it’s possible to do that, that would be seen with pretty widespread, if not unanimous, support as an improvement,” Satter said.

Between days of the week, TV coverage and the possibility of a championship day — plus making sure the arena and hotels are properly available for any such adjustments — there’s a lot to line up.

But it seems how to reward regular-season success might be the key driver, provided that doesn’t cause impossible roadblocks among the other factors.

Coaches have long been concerned with who gets how many days off and when. That helped drive a recent change that moved the men’s first round from Tuesday to Wednesday so lower seeds didn’t get the perceived benefit of getting a game under their belts and also a day’s rest before playing again.

That concern may spell doom for interested parties hopeful for a West Coast Conference-like bracket that pushes the top two teams into the tournament semifinals before playing.

“We looked at the West Coast Conference’s model and a few other conference tournaments, and how do you find a balance of rewarding teams for their success over the course of the regular season,” Satter said. “What is the right amount to change something if we do it, if it’s different than how we’ve been doing it.”

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