Note: The PDF featuring the entire Metro Season Preview, all 33,805 words, and previews of all 13 teams, including feature stories on Jeremiah Anderson and Nevada Smith, is available in PDF form at the bottom of this webpage.
For a crew of arena workers who turn over Jim Whelan Boardwalk Hall for concerts, wrestling, combat sports and more every single year, the logo on the floor is just incidental. But just over an hour after Gerry McNamara cut down the net, an icon of the region’s college basketball
identity became an artifact with the blood on their hands.
They hardly stopped to think as the MAAC stickers were ripped off the playing surface and MAAC-branded banners were taken down around the building. There were only about 34 hours in between the final buzzer of the tournament and the first whistle of the New Jersey high school wrestling championships inside the 97-year-old arena.
But the stickers won’t be reprinted and re-applied when the conference returns to Atlantic City in March. I’ll still drive down the Garden State Parkway and into town on the Atlantic City Expressway, but when I get there, I’ll see a different wordmark adorning streetlamp signs, billboards, and the basketball court itself.
Two months after the stickers were ripped off the floor, the logo officially died. Players and parents from the baseball champions took their souvenirs within moments of the celebration finishing. There were no logos left in the ballpark to be cleaned up.
The long-running joke of being the “other MA(A)C” is over.
Welcome to the Metro Conference.
It was hardly a surprise to anybody that paid attention. A victory for Occam’s razor, if you will. That didn’t stop people from complaining. Change is always met with people having to be dragged kicking and screaming into the future, but many inside the conference think that the rebrand shows a proactive nature that will help keep the conference alive in this evolving age of college sports.
Time will tell if that’s the case, or if it is just a futile decision that becomes a footnote on Wikipedia pages.
What we do know is that college basketball is in a particularly strange spot right now. We had an offseason filled with eligibility lawsuits that brought on a second transfer portal window in August. That itself spurred another wave of lawsuits that will continue into the season, defining eligibility differently on a literal case-by-case basis. All while Congress has been debating a bill that would put some of that power back in the NCAA’s hands. Where the NCAA still does hold power, it has wielded it, expanding the NCAA Tournament to 76 teams.
Rumors swirl about schools dropping teams and some departments even dropping down out of Division I because it’s simply not financially sustainable. For now, the Metro’s programs have avoided that fate, but that doesn’t mean that it’s not looming over the sport.
But for all of the argument over the summer about the direction of the sport, we keep coming back.
In March, that crew of arena workers will unwrap new packaging. They’ll place down a sticker that says “Metro” in the key. Then, 10 teams will play for the right to make the NCAA Tournament. It’s a new logo, a new name, but the same dream.
Listen to Metro men’s conference preview podcast episode:
Listen to Metro women’s conference preview podcast episode:
