It could be worse.
"I had the press release written twice saying we have to cancel the tournament because we could not find that last team," UAA athletic director Steve Cobb said. "Miraculously, we got that sixth team."
Three cheers, then, for Nicholls State -- the Louisiana school that in July agreed to travel north for the Carrs/Safeway Great Alaska Shootout. Without the Colonels, this week's Thanksgiving menu at Sullivan Arena may have offered four women's teams, but zero men's teams.
Once one of the only college basketball tournaments held prior to Thanksgiving, the Shootout used to be a dominant player on the preseason hoop scene and had its pick of teams. These days it's one of dozens of early tournaments, which means it has plenty of competition when it comes to attracting teams.
Toss in a depressed national economy, and fewer men's teams than ever were willing or able to make the trip to Alaska this year.
"The landscape has changed so much," Cobb said. "Our biggest partners used to be the NCAA and ESPN. Now they are our biggest competitors."
ESPN, which televised Shootout games to national audiences from 1985 through 2007, now runs its own preseason tournament that offers the same exemption as the Shootout. The exemption allows a team to play three tournament games but only count one of them against the maximum number of regular-season games allowed by the NCAA each season.
The NCAA limits how often a team can play in exempt tournaments, and also allows only one team per conference to compete at any one tournament. Because of those rules, no school that has played in the previous four Shootouts was eligible to return this year, nor could UAA invite more than one team from the same conference to the party.
"The pool is not nearly as big as people think it is," Cobb said.
Rusty Osborne, the UAA men's basketball coach, said the university worked hard to find seven teams to keep this year's field at eight.
"We contacted every team eligible to come," he said. "Hundreds of them."
Such headaches don't exist when it comes to putting together a women's field -- mostly because there are fewer preseason tournaments available for women.
Tim Moser, the UAA women's coach, said that even if the men's event had been canceled this year, a women's tournament would have been held.
"As long as I'm here, we're going to keep that tournament going," he said.
Cobb said there was never much thought of increasing the size of the four-team, four-game women's tournament to make up for the smaller men's tournament. He said the five-day Shootout is already jam-packed with games at Sullivan Arena, even though the men will play nine games this year instead of the usual 12.
He said there was some discussion of turning the men's tournament into a four-team event this year, but the idea didn't get much traction. Men's teams come to Alaska to play three games, not two, he said.
Osborne thinks the six-team field is a one-year deal, and that next year's field will be back to eight.
Cobb thinks so too. He said seven men's teams have signed contracts to play in next year's tournament -- and the price of backing out has gone up to $150,000. The buyout price used to be $50,000, Cobb said, but too many schools were willing to pay that amount to change their plans. He hopes the increased penalty makes schools think twice about pulling out of the Shootout.
In the meantime, UAA is hopeful the quality of this year's tournament teams will make up for the quantity of teams.
"This is a good compromise," Osborne said. "We've got good teams."
They include:
• Nicholls State, a 20-game winner last season.
• Oklahoma, which lost Player of the Year Blake Griffin to the NBA but boasts the Sporting News' preseason Player of the Year in sophomore Willie Warren.
• Houston, which returns conference Newcomer of the Year Aubrey Coleman from last season's 21-win team.
• San Diego, 16-16 last season but expected to be better this season with the return of guard Brandon Johnson, who scored a school-record 590 points in 2007-08 but missed last season with an injury.
• Washington State, which is getting a fresh start with new coach Ken Bone, who is familiar to UAA fans from his many years at Seattle Pacific. Last season, Bone brought Portland State to the Shootout.
The women's field is solid, with Cincinnati, Coastal Carolina and Western Carolina joining three-time defending champion UAA.
Moser said that he's hopeful of landing one major women's team each year. Cincinnati of the Big East counts as this year's big catch.
"We'll try to protect our tournament," he said.
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