A Sea Of Red

ESPN finally "officially" announces BracketBuster field. Liberty will host a game Feb. 18 or 19. 9 of the 10 Big South teams are involved.

From Chris on twitter.

This is kinda strange, tho...

The one not involved? Reigning league champ and probable preseason favorite Coastal Carolina. That's odd.

Oh well. Good to be involved in this again. Hopefully at that point of the year we have a team that's gelled and can put on a good show. And hopefully it gives us a good opponent to play a home-and-home with.

I completely didn't remember that they won the league last year. I think that's funny that you can win the regular season and nobody cares because you choked in the tournament final.

Coastal was slated to be in the Bracketbusters event, but ESPN needed a team to fill out the Charleston Classic field (which happens to be an ESPN-run tournament) and asked Coastal to fill the spot...in turn, Coastal had to drop the bracketbuster game from their schedule to not go over the maximum-games limit.

Thanks for the answer on that one, WEF.

I would have assumed that no one wanted to do the return game to the tiny gym in Conway. But the other makes sense.

When you get to the point ESPN has gotten to with every single Big South team is included in a Bracket Buster game, the whole "Bracket Buster" idea is pretty much pointless.

LUconn wrote:When you get to the point ESPN has gotten to with every single Big South team is included in a Bracket Buster game, the whole "Bracket Buster" idea is pretty much pointless.

All ESPN wants is the best 11 possible TV games...so they want their pool of teams to be as broad as possible so they don't miss out on a team that comes out of nowhere to have a great season. Now I see no chance that Gardner-Webb could be a team like that, but there's no harm from ESPN's perspective to include them in the field of teams.