September 7, 2007

Big West faces baseball test

In today's collegiate sports world, the Big West is a sub-prime buyer.

The application says the conference is gainfully employed and resides in the same territory as better-known Division I athletic companies, but those familiar with the neighborhood know better. Economically speaking, the conference has been dealing with diminishing returns for more than a decade.

The one sport that always bucked this trend, however, was baseball. It could be counted on to compete with the best nationally, in the rankings, on the field, even in some cases at the box office, and without question in the annual amateur draft.

The last Big West men's basketball player to find even temporary NBA success was Michael Olowakandi, and feel free to snort at your pleasure. But baseball? Troy Tulowitzki, Mark Kotsay, Chad Cordero, Jason Giambi, Brady Anderson, Michael Young, and so on.

Now, one wonders.

George Horton is a great college coach who took the foundation set by Augie Garrido and made it even firmer as Fullerton's head coach, and while it would be wrong to say his departure for Oregon may send the conference reeling, it can't be ignored.

It uncomfortably fits with the conference's past.

For starters, Horton took Fullerton to the College World Series four of the last five seasons and won the title in 2004. He won 50 games in a season three times, and he seemed to find success regardless of what kind of team he had. He's had CWS teams that were tremendously talented, teams that were extremely young, and last season took a team that was essentially feckless for three months to the CWS once again.

Fullerton has been a one-sport school long enough, as some are wont to remind often, to make the last real success in another sport almost impossible to recall. The biggest sports news off Nutwood outside of baseball the last decade was a women's cross-country runner who was paying her tuition by stripping at a nearby lap dance emporium.

The reality is that Horton is now gone, and so is the man who took Long Beach State to the CWS five times since 1989, Dave Snow. The only other Big West school to advance to the CWS between 1989 and 2006 was Fresno State in 1991, and they left the conference the next season. UC Irvine made it in 2007.

Fullerton will replace Horton with someone capable, but any bump in the program's profile is bad in general for a conference that lately has had the profile of a cliff.

"It's a big point," Long Beach State coach Mike Weathers said Thursday. "A lot of people may think I'm happy to see George leave and that it will be easier now, but what it does is make me worry about the conference status.

"You look at what he's done for the school and conference and it's a major loss. He's taken Fullerton to Omaha and won titles and we've remained strong nationally, and we can't afford as a conference to fall back. As much as we hate to admit it, they were our safety net. They kept us in the limelight."

Defections of name universities and name coaches have had a major impact on the conference's stature over the years.

Big West football began its demise when San Diego State left in 1975, and its death knell was the departure of Fresno State in 1992. It is now little more than a fuzzy and slightly perverse memory; the last nine Big West football titles were won by schools outside of California.

Big West men's basketball thrived on the strength of one man, Jerry Tarkanian, for two epochs, his first with Long Beach State and his second at UNLV, where he won a national title in 1990 and made it to the title game a year later. Then he was gone, and so was UNLV. Now it's a big thing for a Big West school to win a NCAA postseason game, and the defending champ, the 49ers, are headed to probation.

Big West women's basketball lived on the work of Long Beach's Joan Bonvicini in the '80s, and she took the 49ers to back-to-back Final Fours. Then she left for Arizona, and Big West women's basketball was relegated to UCSB dominating the league and then going one-and-done in the tourney.

The 49ers' women's volleyball program was a perennial contender and three-time national champ, but Brian Gimmillaro's team has been struggling since their 2001 appearance in the NCAA title game, and no one has stepped up to become a national contender.

UC Irvine won the '07 NCAA men's volleyball title playing out of the Mountain Pacific Sports Federation, the first time a Big West school has won the title since the 49ers of '91, and the only other school to make it to the title game since '91 had been the 49ers.

Zot's all, folks.

It isn't enough. There were perfectly good financial reasons why Long Beach and Fullerton dropped football- like bleeding money, no fans and California's gender equity rules - and Big West football was a misnomer in its last decade, but in retrospect losing a place in the football world has been a negative.

It seemed like a good idea to go the all-California route in terms of membership, too, because no one in Southern California cares about rivalries with Idaho, Nevada and New Mexico State. But the unfortunate truth is no one here cares about rivalries with San Luis Obispo or UC Riverside, either.

Baseball was the Big West's backstop, and even if the site of dancing elephants and pompous Titan fans could drive a Blair Field patron to drink, Fullerton's strength helped create the best rivalry in the conference (Titans-Dirtbags) and kept the Big West viable.

George Horton will be missed. One can only hope he didn't take all of the Big West's profile with him to Oregon.