Lack of attendance? What were the reasons?

(03-18-2017 01:31 PM)shizzle787 Wrote:  Lack of attendance? What were the reasons?

The official reason given was academic concerns but in all honesty it was a mixture of poor fan support and more importantly a lack of revenue.

http://articles.latimes.com/1989-12-13/s...tournament

Once it was dropped, Arizona, Stanford & UCLA were able to keep it that way until UCLA changed their vote once they got a guarantee of the game being played in LA annually whereas the first run it was rotated among the schools

The coaches were also against it. Lute Olson in particular was firmly against it.

(03-18-2017 01:31 PM)shizzle787 Wrote:  Lack of attendance? What were the reasons?

The key factor was that like the Big 10, the PAC had no history of a conference tournament, and it was proud of that fact (in the 1980s, there was a philosophical debate between the PAC/B1G on one side and the conferences with a tournament on the other about which approach was best). So in 1987, the tournament was an experiment that basically was ahead of its time, just didn't fit with the culture of the conference, and as others have said it generated little excitement and was poorly attended, so costs + it never really was embraced by the conference community made for an easy decision to snuff it out after a few years.

The impetus to revive it came when the B1G started its tournament in 1998. That left the PAC as the only major conference without one, and once it became clear the B1G wasn't going back on it that was viewed as untenable, kind of like how the Big 12 felt the last couple years as the only P5 without a football CCG.