Dayton and the First Four remain college basketball’s perfect mismatch

At its core, the First Four doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. Sure, there is an obvious motivation at work here -- mo’ teams, mo’ games, mo’ money -- but analytically, the First Four doesn’t fit in any way.

The four additional NCAA Tournament games, which will be played Tuesday and Wednesday night, don’t serve any real purpose outside of the one already stated, and their most noteworthy impact is making it more difficult to fill out a bracket and muddling the vernacular of the big dance. What the vast majority of the sports world refers to as the first round officially became the second round when the First Four was instituted, a fact that forces constant clarification through the use of terms like “round of 64” and “round of 32.” Thankfully, that’s all going to change next year when the Thursday, Friday games will resume their rightful “first round” title.

The original reason behind the “play-in game” was that the Mountain West Conference had just been formed and granted an automatic bid into the Tournament. The powers that be in college basketball then determined that the world simply could not be deprived of that final underachieving major conference 12 seed. So instead of decreasing the at-large pool by one, the NCAA elected to create an “opening round” in which two 16 seeds would battle it out for the right to advance to the tournament’s main draw ... to the real NCAA Tournament. In 2011, the opening round was expanded to four games, played by the bottom four automatic qualifiers and the bottom four at-large qualifiers.

The expanded opening round has been fun -- President Obama came to a game, a team that participated in its first year wound up advancing all the way to the Final Four, BYU is always there doing BYU things -- but it still doesn’t make any sense. There are 32 Division-I conferences which own automatic bids to the NCAA Tournament. Thirty-two automatic bids and 32 at-large bids would seem to be the ideal scenario for an event that attempts to celebrate both conference tournament and regular-season achievement, but this is a world where sports things that make too much sense aren’t highly valued.

As a host site for the opening round of the NCAA Tournament, the city of Dayton also seems to make no sense.

Located in between Cincinnati and Columbus in the football-obsessed state of Ohio, Dayton doesn’t exactly conjure up images of basketball hoops nailed to the side of barns or high-quality pick-up games played inside of caged parks. And yet, this is a place that (quietly) embraces and supports basketball as fully as just about any city in America.

Despite its relatively modest arena, the University of Dayton has ranked in the top 25 nationally for attendance 19 times since 1972. This for a team that has never won a national championship, and which has won just five NCAA Tournament game since 1984. Three of those victories came last year during a run that gave the rest of the country a chance just to see how rabid Flyer basketball fans can be:

Basically, UD is the perfect mismatch for the only aspect of March Madness that lacks public favor.

The NCAA never planned on Dayton being the permanent home of the First Four, but both the university and the city of Dayton embraced something at which the rest of the country was rolling its eyes. They pumped millions of dollars into an event that now has 70 sponsors, has been attended by a sitting U.S. president and British prime minister, and which was sold out for the first time in 2013. The UD band has filled in for schools whose own band couldn’t afford to make the trip, area fans with no allegiance to any of the teams in town will often arbitrarily pick one to root for and wear their colors to the game, the city even put together a “First Four Festival” that began in 2012.

None of this is possible without a community that simply adores college hoops.

Still, as recently as two years ago, the NCAA made it known that it had plans to look at other potential host sites for the event. That news served as a call to action for Dayton’s city leaders and university officials.

“It’s our goal to make Dayton as synonymous with the First Four as Omaha is with the College World Series.”

Dayton launched a full-fledged campaign to keep the First Four, creating a website, releasing videos, and successfully getting the event to sell out for the first time in 2013. The result? The First Four will remain at UD Arena until at least 2018.

The First Four and Dayton have always been a quirky, perfect mismatch, so it’s only right that on Wednesday the Flyers will become the first NCAA Tournament team in 28 years to play a true home game. This all came about because UD was the last team the selection committee gave an at-large bid to, a fact that relegated them to First Four status and a date with fellow 11 seed Boise State. That was a shock to many, as the Flyers had seemed to be comfortably in the field of 68 after a 25-8 regular season that saw them make it to the championship game of the Atlantic 10 Tournament ... then again, nothing seems to happen normally for Dayton basketball.

Under coach Archie Miller, Dayton has been one of the best home teams in all of college basketball. The Flyers are 16-0 inside UD Arena this season, and their 21-game home winning streak is the seventh-longest in Division I. Playing a true NCAA Tournament game in the building, against a team from Idaho, on a Wednesday is an extremely odd set of circumstances, but that’s probably fitting for a city and a school which thrive on the bizarre when it comes to basketball.