GWC Tournament Schedule
NAPERVILLE, IL—NJIT, seeded fourth among the men's teams, will take on fifth-seeded Houston Baptist on Thursday at 2:30 pm (CST) to open the 2012 Great West Conference basketball tournament in Chicago.
The winner of that first-round game will advance to face #1 Utah Valley on Friday at noon (CST) in the first semifinal game. The 2012 GWC Championship game will be played on Saturday at 4:30 pm (CST). The winner of the GWC title game will advance to the national CollegeInsider.com postseason Tournament.
The entire tournament is being played in the Emil and Patricia A. Jones Convocation Center, a 6,000-seat arena on the campus of tournament host Chicago State. The multi-purpose arena opened in 2007.
With the exception of first-place Utah Valley's runaway to its second straight regular season title, it should come as little surprise that seeds two through four in the highly-competitive GWC were not decided until all of the regular season games were complete on Saturday night and even then, it took the calculation of the latest national RPI (Ratings Percentage Index) to determine the third and fourth seed tiebreaker between NJIT and Texas-Pan American, each of which finished 5-5 in conference play.
The RPI is a complicated formula used by the NCAA to rank all 344 Division I teams from top to bottom using a combination of each team's results in all games, along with the result's of each team's opponents, so that every game played by every Division I team factors into the overall rating.
This year, with only a five-team field (Chicago State's men, who finished in sixth place, are not part of tournament field), the difference between being seeded third (Texas-Pan American) and fourth (NJIT) is the difference between having to play the number five team on Thursday, as NJIT will, and getting a bye into the Friday semifinals, as Texas-Pan American is.
In order to win the championship, NJIT would need to win three games in three days, as opposed to Texas-Pan American, which would need two wins in two days for the title.
A year ago, the Great West Tournament championship game, won by North Dakota, was decided in double overtime and the six tournament games were decided by a combined 11 points and no one game was decided by more than three points.
This year, Utah Valley clinched first-place long ago, but lost on Saturday at North Dakota, 57-56, to finish 9-1. The win on a buzzer-beater, lifted North Dakota to 6-4 and clinched the second seed for the defending GWC Tournament champ.
Texas-Pan American lost at Houston Baptist in the final GWC regular season game of the season, dropping the Broncs to 5-5 in conference play, the same record as NJIT.
With NJIT and UTPA having split their head-to-head games and owning the same records against the teams ahead of them in the standings, the next tiebreaker is the NCAA's RPI, where the Broncs stood 16 spots ahead of the Highlanders in the NCAA's ranking of all 344 Division I teams entering play on Saturday. At this late stage in the season, the result of one game (Saturday) out of 29 (NJIT) or 31 (UTPA) was not enough of a shift for NJIT advance past UTPA in the rankings.
Houston Baptist, 3-7 in the Great West, has eliminated NJIT from each of the previous two Great West Tournaments. In 2010, HBU knocked NJIT out in the semifinals after the Highlanders had beaten North Dakota in the quarterfinals. And last year, the Huskies, seeded seventh, upset the second-seeded Highlanders in the opening round, 72-70.
This season, the Highlanders and Huskies split their regular season games. NJIT won at home, 85-62, on January 21, but lost in Houston, 75-68, on February 18.
The men's bracket goes as follows—
Thursday, 2:30 pm: #4 NJIT (5-5 GWC, 13-16 overall) vs. #5 Houston Baptist (3-7, 10-19 overall)
Friday semifinals: noon, #1 Utah Valley (9-1 GWC, 20-11 overall) vs. NJIT-HBU winner; #2 North Dakota (6-4 GWC, 15-14 overall) vs. #3 Texas-Pan American (5-5 GWC, 11-20 overall)
Championship Saturday at 4:30 pm
Interestingly, both NJIT's men's and women's basketball teams will have to follow the same path of opponents to reach their respective championship games on Saturday. The NJIT men are playing the Houston Baptist men at 2:30 pm CST ahead of the 5 pm game between women of NJIT and HBU.
If the Highlander teams prevail in their Thursday games, the NJIT men will play Utah Valley at noon on Friday in the men's semifinal and the NJIT women will play Utah Valley in the women's semifinal at 5 pm.
