The rise and fall of Bracket Busters (2024)

Anyone who has spent time around Texas coach Shaka Smart or his former assistants has heard his signature three-word phrase “aggressive, confident and loose.” They might not know that motto originated on Feb. 18, 2011. Smart was coaching VCU then, and he wrote those words on the whiteboard in the locker room before an ESPN Bracket Busters game at Wichita State. After an 18-5 start, the Rams had lost three of their past five games, including two straight at home. Their chances of earning an NCAA Tournament at-large bid were teetering, and now they faced a fraught road test against a talented team fighting to preserve its own postseason status.

Unbeknownst to many, VCU was also dealing with some minor off-the-court issues that Smart says had created tension in the locker room. The season could easily have splintered. So Smart re-emphasized how the Rams needed to play against the Shockers with those three words, continually barking “Be A-C-L!” to his guys during the back-and-forth game in front of a sellout crowd.

“The atmosphere of that arena really helped us galvanize,” Smart recalls. “Our guys understood that the only way to win there was to be together.”

The Rams pulled out a 68-67 thriller thanks to Joey Rodriguez’s two free throws on a controversial foul with 0.8 seconds remaining. A little more than three weeks later, VCU nervously awaited word of its fate on Selection Sunday. Smart’s team squeaked in with an assignment to the First Four, then made history by advancing to the Final Four. The unlikely story wouldn’t have materialized if not for that victory at Wichita State.

“No way we get in without that,” Smart says. “That definitely was a difference maker.”

Such was the impact and relevance, for a time, of Bracket Busters. From 2003 to ’13, ESPN opened the gates and handed the keys to mid-major programs during a crucial weekend late in the season. The network gave the little guys a rare national showcase and the opportunity to improve their stock with the selection committee, and for many years the event was a hit with audiences. Four teams, including both VCU and Wichita State, made surprise runs to the Final Four just weeks after playing in Bracket Busters. Many coaches and players who participated remember it fondly.

“Bracket Busters was the best thing ESPN ever did to give mid-majors a chance to earn an at-large bid,” says Miami coach Jim Larranaga, who led George Mason to the 2006 Final Four.

Yet by the time Bracket Busters bowed out in 2013, few mourned its demise. The sport had changed, the TV landscape looked different and a cool concept had outlived its purpose. Mid-majors still struggle for exposure and access to the NCAA Tournament, which occasionally leads to hope that another event of similar stature could come along and offer a life raft. But the early magic of Bracket Busters might never be replicated.

“It worked well for us at that time, whether it was at Winthrop or Wichita State,” says Shockers coach Gregg Marshall. “But it’s a different time now, and there would have to be a different format. I just don’t know where we are now with mid-major teams getting that chance.”

Bracket Busters was the brainchild of Burke Magnus, then an ESPN vice president, and the commissioners of the Missouri Valley, the Horizon, the WAC and the MAC. The first edition, in 2003, featured nine games, and many of those 18 teams were on the NCAA Tournament bubble. Six of the participants ended up in the field. The highlight games of the inaugural weekend were Fresno State against Creighton and Gonzaga versus Tulsa. Yes, even the Zags saw the early benefit of Bracket Busters.

The field expanded to 46 teams the following year and included Butler, which was coming off a Sweet 16 run the previous March. By 2005, Bracket Busters had become its own mid-major mini-madness, with 64 teams from 13 conferences competing. ESPN heavily promoted the games and aired them across its channels on a Friday and Saturday. It was a success from both a ratings and interest standpoint. “It really was an event that college basketball fans looked forward to with intrigue,” Missouri Valley commissioner Doug Elgin says.

And the timing was right to shine a light on some of these lesser-known but up-and-coming programs. In 2005, Bracket Busters participants earned five at-large bids; a year later, six teams catapulted from a Bracket Busters appearance into an at-large bid. The 2006 version also provided a watershed moment. George Mason beat Wichita State, 70-67, on a late 3-pointer by Tony Skinn. A few weeks later, those two teams met in the Sweet 16, with George Mason winning again and crashing the Final Four a couple of days later. The Patriots had lost to Hofstra in the Colonial Athletic tournament but still got a No. 11 seed from the selection committee.

“Members of the selection committee who had never seen us play before were given a golden opportunity to watch us versus Wichita State, and at that point we were certainly on their bubble,” Larranaga says. “They tune in and have to be impressed with both teams, because it was an absolutely great game. That win on the road also gave our players a tremendous amount of confidence.”

Steph Curry played in Bracket Busters twice. In 2008, Davidson won at Winthrop, a key road victory that Bob McKillop says helped vault them toward their memorable Elite Eight run. The following year pitted Davidson against Butler in perhaps the highest-profile game in the history of the event, so big that Dick Vitale was on the call. Curry had sprained his ankle the week before and was questionable to go against the Bulldogs. He did play but was clearly not close to 100 percent as he suffered through a tough shooting performance. Butler freshman Gordon Hayward, meanwhile, scored 27 points to lead his team an important win. Davidson settled for the NIT in Curry’s final college season.

“We really felt we needed that Butler game to get in the conversation of getting an at-large bid,” McKillop says. “Steph showed a lot of courage just to play in that game. If you had seen that ankle a week earlier, you would have said, ‘This guy is out for three weeks.’ But it was a real coming-out party for Hayward.”

Davidson opened the 2009-10 season at Hinkle Fieldhouse in a return game. Butler won that one too, and advanced to the national title game against Duke. The 2011 Bracket Busters brought the first of two important VCU-Wichita State clashes. The Shockers won at VCU early in the 2012-13 season in the return game, a résumé booster that helped them clinch an at-large bid as a No. 9 seed. Wichita State went to the 2013 national semifinals, making it three times in four years that a Bracket Busters participant was playing in April.

“I don’t think there’s any doubt it was a difference maker every year for one or two teams that didn’t win their automatic bid,” Elgin says. “There were teams that enhanced their résumé to the extent of consideration and selection to the NCAA Tournament. That was the whole point of it.”

Wichita State’s Final Four appearance in 2013 — a few weeks after the Shockers beat Detroit in Bracket Busters — helped close the curtain on the event. By then, Bracket Busters had morphed into something almost unrecognizable from its original intention.

“Over time, it really grew into sort of this behemoth,” says Nick Dawson, who assumed command of the event from Magnus in 2008. “This just became another game to schedule, and nobody was ever happy with the results. It created a lot of friction toward the end.”

Five primary factors contributed to the death of Bracket Busters:

• It got too bloated. After seeing the initial success, more teams and conferences wanted in. Leagues asked to have all of their teams participate instead of just the cream of the crop, especially because they were building a break into the conference schedule anyway.

A field that started with 18 teams from four conferences had expanded by its final year to 122 teams from 13 conferences. The vast majority of those teams had little to no shot of an NCAA Tournament at-large bid. Outside of the top matchups, few of the games sparked any national interest. Many weren’t even televised. The uniqueness and tournament feel just didn’t exist when cellar dwellers in one-bid leagues met in late February.

• The logistics got too complicated. One of the appealing aspects of Bracket Busters was that organizers waited as long as possible to set the matchups so they could identify the best teams. The schedule usually wasn’t announced until about three weeks before the event. Though teams knew whether they’d be on the road or at home, those traveling often had to make expensive, last-minute arrangements.

Smart was an assistant at Akron when the Zips traveled to Nevada for a 2006 game. The Wolf Pack, who had Nick Fazekas and Ramon Sessions, won by 27 points, and Akron flew commercial out of Sacramento the next day. That meant a 4 a.m. bus ride over the Sierra Nevada mountains.

“There was this crazy blizzard, and we’re seeing all these cars sliding off road,” Smart says. “At one point, our bus driver stopped to put chains on the tires. All that just to go out there and have a tough go of it against a good team.”

A few years into the event, conferences insisted on a return game the following season for any team that played its Bracket Busters contest on the road. That created more headaches, and the unwieldy setup led to some ridiculous travel situations. In February 2005, for example, Wisconsin-Milwaukee was sent to Hawaii, which meant the Rainbows were forced to return the game the following December. For cash-strapped athletic departments, it made little sense to play these opponents for no real competitive or strategic advantage. ESPN still handled all the marquee matchups but let the schools and leagues figure out the rest.

“It got really, really difficult for conferences to manage,” says Dawson, an ESPN vice president for programming and acquisitions.

• The most interesting teams got too good. Gonzaga played in the first two editions but no longer needed the event to schedule big-ticket games. Other early staples including Butler, Creighton and Wichita State graduated into major conferences, while VCU and Davidson moved up to the Atlantic 10 and Nevada went to the Mountain West. The A-10 and Mountain West never participated.

The top game of the final Bracket Busters featured two tournament-caliber teams: Saint Mary’s against Creighton. But other televised matchups included ho-hum affairs such as Pacific vs. Western Michigan and Stephen F. Austin at Long Beach State.

“As teams started to perform well, they looked at it and said, ‘I’m not sure I want to be called a mid-major any more,’ ” Dawson says. “It suddenly starts to change and turn into something different than it probably was. If you tried to do it right now, most of the household names you remember from the event wouldn’t even participate.”

Adds Smart, “Once you took a lot of those upper-echelon programs out of it, that took a lot of excitement out of it.”

Toward the end, the Colonial Athletic Association signed a TV deal with NBC, taking that league out of the ESPN package. Though Dawson says that didn’t necessarily prevent CAA teams from participating in Bracket Busters, the machinations to get them in the field no longer seemed worth the trouble. “That was kind of the last Jenga block you pull out, and then the whole thing crumbles,” he says.

• TV exposure got more readily available. Conferences and teams welcomed the additional strong nonconference game that Bracket Busters provided. But they appreciated the ESPN appearances even more. Here they were in late February, a time when power conference brands such as Duke and Kansas usually dominated the slate, getting prime ESPN, ESPN2 and ESPNU windows to themselves.

“The emotional lift we got by playing on national TV at that juncture in the development of our program was critical,” McKillop says.

But in recent years, with the rise of regional sports networks and streaming options — some of which are operated by the conferences themselves — just about every game is accessible to watch somewhere. Sure, there’s no real substitution for the marketing muscle of an ESPN Saturday afternoon tipoff. But if you want to watch a random Big Sky game on a Thursday night, chances are good you can find it. Mid-majors also get opportunities on ESPN during their conference tournaments, as well as on ESPN’s streaming platform.

“Nobody born after 1990 could possibly appreciate how difficult it was to watch mid-major basketball in the mid-aughts,” says Kyle Whelliston, who founded the popular blog The Mid-Majority. ”If you wanted to watch a Missouri Valley or WAC game, that meant accessing a postage stamp-sized feed relay from a degenerate Ukranian gambling site, which usually relayed these feeds from local community access channels. Back then, we called it ‘Pixelvision.’

“In 2020, I have every game from this year’s Big South tournament on Google Drive, in 1080p. Times change.”

• It might have hurt as many teams as it helped. Bracket Busters games only meant marginal bumps in the Ratings Percentage Index, the chief sorting tool for the selection committee until the NET came along in 2018. According to Elgin’s notes, only three of the nine participating Missouri Valley teams in 2005 improved their RPI from the previous week by more than one spot by playing in the Bracket Busters. Seven of the nine teams showed a rise or fall of fewer than 20 spots, and two league teams that played in the postseason actually dropped in the RPI.

The big matchups often served as a mid-major elimination game. That Wichita State team that lost to VCU in 2011, for example, probably deserved to still make the field. The Shockers roared through the NIT, winning their four games by an average of 15 points. Should Davidson, a 26-win team that had a transcendent superstar in Curry, have been left out in 2009 just because it lost to Butler?

Losing a game in Bracket Busters, even if it came against a good team on the road, was usually disastrous for mid-major bubble hopefuls. Elgin remembers attending a regular-season game when one of the coaches complained to him about the event. “What are you doing to me, man?” the coach told Elgin. “If I lose, then I’m out.”

“Yeah,” Elgin replied. “But if you win, you’re in.”

That coach’s team did win, by the way, and made it to the NCAA Tournament.

Good mid-major programs still find it inherently difficult to schedule suitable nonconference opponents. That hurts their résumés and dents their chances of gaining notice from the selection committee. At its best, Bracket Busters provided those teams with a top-100 opponent and a statement opportunity.

That’s why a Bracket Busters revival holds appeal for some.

“I still think that kind of a model would be helpful for teams in mid-major categories,” Elgin says. “There’s a growing need for this type of thing for teams in conferences that can’t get the sufficiently strong schedules they need.”

How it would look and work, though, remains tricky. Let’s assume BYU and Saint Mary’s would no longer be interested in participating. The top possible matchups from the 2019-2020 season, according to the final NET rankings, would have looked something like this:

• East Tennessee State (36) vs. Northern Iowa (48)
• Liberty (67) vs. Yale (69)
• Akron (73) vs. Furman (74)
• Stephen F. Austin (77) vs. Vermont (79)

Good teams and some intriguing games, for sure. But the national interest and effect on tournament résumés would be limited. Only the road teams in those first three matchups would have a chance at earning a Quad 1 victory. If the home team prevailed in the fictional Stephen F. Austin-Vermont game, that would only count as a Quad 3 win — hardly worth the effort or the risk of stepping out of conference.

A return to the slimmed down, best-of-the-bunch Bracket Busters field makes some sense. But given the transient nature of college basketball these days, identifying the top mid-major teams in the preseason would present some challenges. Would ESPN, for example, have picked Northern Iowa in September, with the Panthers coming off a 16-18 season? And remember, Dayton and San Diego State wouldn’t have been involved due to conference affiliations.

Top mid-majors are already scheduling themselves in the nonconference. Utah State played at Saint Mary’s last season. Northern Iowa is going to Richmond this fall. Non-power conferences are putting together their own crossover challenge series as well. What mid-major coaches really want is a shot at the big boys, especially at a neutral site or — gasp! — their home floor. Imagine this Bracket Busters weekend: top teams from the Missouri Valley, Southern, OVC and Conference USA squaring off against squads from the Big Ten, ACC, SEC and Big East.

“As a TV executive, I would be very intrigued if we could pull off some sort of challenge series between the best of the best of mid-majors and a batch of high-majors,” Dawson says. “That sort of David vs. Goliath matchup always creates interest.”

Good luck getting the power conference teams to sign up. They’ve already got full plates with the move to 20-game league schedules, exempt tournaments and crossover games such as the ACC/Big Ten Challenge and the Gavitt Games. What’s the incentive to play a mid-major that’s capable of pulling an upset?

“I just don’t know that high-major teams are going to want to do it,” Marshall says. “It’s not going to help them a whole lot.”

Larranaga spent 25 years as the coach at Bowling Green and George Mason before moving into the ACC with Miami. Though he still has a soft spot for the mid-major level, he doesn’t see much value in playing those teams.

“I’m far more concerned with (the ACC) getting as many teams in the Big Dance as possible,” he says. “Our league is so good top to bottom that you could take the 10th-place team, and they’d have a legitimate chance to get to the Final Four. There are some legitimately good mid-major teams, but if they played in our league, they wouldn’t get an at-large bid because they’d have too many losses.”

ESPN’s philosophy has also changed as college basketball has dipped in national popularity. The network would rather follow the stories and the stars. So the next time an NBA prospect like Ja Morant from Murray State emerges, ESPN can put that player’s games on one of its platforms and trust that fans will watch, regardless of the opponent.

The nebulous term mid-major still exists, though it has become harder and harder to tell which teams actually fit that bill. Many have climbed the ladder, and though it’s impossible to say how much, Bracket Busters probably helped several programs take the next step by giving them national exposure. “It was one of the great events we ever got to be part of,” McKillop says.

Bracket Busters is a time capsule piece now, a flawed but well-intentioned creation that served a need in a specific era. It leaves behind a lot of nostalgia, if no obvious heir.

(Top photo: Fernando Salazar / Wichita Eagle / Tribune News Service via Getty)