Sport College basketball Most championships Western Kentucky (9) Current location New Orleans Current champion Little Rock Number of teams 13 | Played 1977–present Conference Sun Belt Conference TV partner ESPN2 Current stadium Lakefront Arena | |
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Format Single-elimination tournament Official website SunBeltSports.org Men's Basketball Last contest 2016 Sun Belt Conference Men's Basketball Tournament | ||
The Sun Belt Conference Men's Basketball Tournament has been played every year since the formation of the Sun Belt Conference for the 1976–77 academic year.
Contents
The winner of the tournament is guaranteed an automatic berth into the NCAA Men's Division I Basketball Championship.
Format
The size and format of the Sun Belt tournament has varied widely since its establishment in 1976. The size of the conference has ranged between a minimum of six teams and as many as thirteen.
Nonetheless, the tournament has consistently utilized a simple single-elimination style tournament. With a few exceptions, all conference members are typically invited to each tournament. Depending on the total number of teams in the league during a particular year, higher-seeded teams have sometimes received byes into the quarterfinal or semifinal rounds. Teams have always been seeded based on regular season conference records, although some modifications were made when the league was split into divisions during the 2000s.
Hosts
With some exceptions, the tournament has historically been played at the home gym of one of the conference's members (e.g. Louisiana–Lafayette's Cajundome, North Texas' UNT Coliseum) or at a major arena in a nearby city (e.g. Mobile Civic Center near South Alabama).
Some of the more common host venues have included the Charlotte Coliseum in Charlotte, North Carolina (Charlotte), the Birmingham Jefferson Convention Complex in Birmingham, Alabama (UAB), Barton Coliseum in Little Rock, Arkansas (Little Rock), and E.A. Diddle Arena in Bowling Green, Kentucky (Western Kentucky).
However, the tournament has been hosted at a neutral arena site each year since 2009 (Hot Springs, Arkansas and New Orleans, Louisiana). Lakefront Arena in New Orleans had previously hosted the event in 2002 when UNO was still a Sun Belt member but the Privateers have since departed the conference. The only other neutral sites to host a Sun Belt tournament were the Hampton Coliseum in Hampton, Virginia (1985) and the Mississippi Coast Coliseum in Biloxi, Mississippi (1992–1993).
NCAA performances
The Sun Belt has a storied basketball history, sending multiple teams into the NCAA tournament in the 1980s and 1990s (most recently 1994), and then again in 2008 when both regular season champion South Alabama, and tournament winner Western Kentucky received bids, and in 2013 with Western Kentucky and Middle Tennessee.
Charlotte reached the Final Four in 1977, and future Sun Belt member Western Kentucky reached the Final Four in 1971. Overall, past and present Sun Belt schools have posted 21 wins in the NCAA Tournament during the time they were conference members.