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New 'Vegas 16' tournament unveils bracket – with one problem

Sam Cooper
College football writer

While college basketball fans around the country pored over their NCAA tournament brackets, a new postseason tournament – the Vegas 16 – unveiled its inaugural bracket to little fanfare Monday.

There was an issue with the bracket, too. Let’s see if you can spot it.

That’s right. The Vegas 16 has only eight teams.

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Former UNLV, Arizona and Washington State athletic director Jim Livengood, the tournament’s selection committee chairman, told the Las Vegas Review-Journal that the group organizing the event planned to bring in 16 high-caliber programs, but eight ended up being the best option.

“We had two choices,” Livengood said. “We could go up to 16, but it would be more of quantity and not as much quality. We felt like the smartest thing to do, and we decided (Sunday) night, was let’s just go with eight teams. Let’s make sure they’re eight quality teams and they were representative regionally, nationally and so on and so forth.”

The tournament field – Tennessee Tech (19–11), Old Dominion (22–13), UC Santa Barbara (18–13), Northern Illinois (21–12), Oakland (21–11), Towson (20–12), Louisiana Tech (23–9) and East Tennessee State (23–11) – doesn’t feature a single power conference team, a mark of tangible credibility the tournament, which was marketed as a “bowl game for basketball,” sought.

“With those power five schools, they’re going to want to know who else is playing in it,” Livengood said. “If you can get two of them, that’s all it takes. But when you get down through the NCAA and you get down through the 32 teams of the (National Invitation Tournament), there are not a lot of schools left that have had really good enough years.”

The unveiling of a half-sized bracket, of course, made the new tournament a bit of a punching bag on social media on Monday. A fictitious “leaked” bracket, which included the Harlem Globetrotters and “NBA Mascots” even made its way around Twitter.

The tournament, to its credit, had a good sense of humor about it all.

With the reduced field in place, the tournament will start two days later than originally intended with four games taking place on March 28 at Mandalay Bay Events Center in Las Vegas. The semifinals will then take place the following day with the championship game capping the event off on March 30.

The tournament is headlined by Oakland, which led the nation in scoring at 86.3 points per game and features the Horizon League Player of the Year Kay Felder (24.2 ppg). Another league (Conference USA) player of the year – Louisiana Tech’s Alex Hamilton (19.7 points, 6.2 assists, 5.7 rebounds per game) – will also compete in Vegas.

Livengood told the Review Journal that any first-year tournament has issues getting off the ground, which will help moving into 2017 and beyond.

“We’re going to play around with some thoughts when the tournament’s over of what kinds of things make sense for next year,” Livengood said. “Remember, this was only announced at the end of November, first of December, so that’s a short time period. We will really have now the full year to get ready for 2017.”

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Sam Cooper is a contributor for the Yahoo Sports blogs. Have a tip? Email him or follow him on Twitter!