Now there’s a question for the ages. The CIAA Basketball Tournament is an annual destination for sports fans around the world, but when you measure the popularity of CIAA football against that of the conference basketball tournament, you wonder why there is such a great disparity between the two products.
Clearly, the CIAA is doing a marvelous job of maintaining and expanding its reach in black college athletics with the basketball tournament. It’s drawing power is so lucrative – $31 million in total economic impact in 2008 – that it is among the most well-attended and popular college basketball tournaments in the county, despite being a Division II conference.
Conversely, the draw of football is nowhere near the influence of the basketball tournament. Of course you can’t compare a week-long tournament to a complete season, but it is fair to say that the energy and fiscal impact that the SWAC conference brings over the course of a football season is relatively comparable to what the CIAA does in week-long basketball tournament.
Comparable in recognition, not just money.
So what does this mean for the nation’s oldest black college conference? Does it mean that football is an inferior product to other conferences, or that the interest just isn’t as present? Has the MEAC siphoned away most of the historically-strong CIAA teams, if not all of them?
