BOISE − The Big Sky Conference has been holding its postseason basketball tournaments in Boise for six seasons now, and according to commissioner Tom Wistrcill, there’s a good chance it will be back here for many years to come.

The current contract with Idaho Central Arena in downtown Boise expires in two years. The Big Sky will probably start entertaining bids for the next contract in a year or so, said Wistrcill. But it will take a pretty dynamic offer to convince the ten conference schools to move their postseason coronation out of Idaho’s capital city.

“Boise has been a great home for us,” Wistrcill said. “First of all, the people are really welcoming, the city has opened their arms and kind of taken us in. We love the arena. We love the hotel and restaurant and bar situation down here. Our fans like to come and have a good time. So that’s great.

“Most importantly, we can create this championship tournament kind of atmosphere and our student-athletes and coaches love it,” he continued. “I get comments from dang near every team like, ‘Wow Tom, this is really cool and it feels big time.’ So you put all that together, along with the fact that seven of our ten schools can drive here… That just kind of makes it a really good home for the Big Sky.”

But with all of that being said, Wistrcill was not ready to award a contract extension to Boise just yet. The conference would be derelict if it didn’t allow other cities to make their best pitch to host the tournament. That’s particularly true with the dissolution of the Pac-12 Conference after this season. That means that Las Vegas, which already hosts a couple of other conference tournaments, might get in the bidding picture for the Big Sky.

“They have lots of facilities there,” Wistrcill said of Las Vegas. “And they’re always focused on hotel nights. We can’t replace the Pac-12 from an attendance standpoint, but from a hotel standpoint, for teams and food and beverage and that type of things, I’m sure they’ll make an aggressive pitch to us. But it will be hard to get us away from Boise, because it’s been a really good home.”

Wistrcill, who is a member of the NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament Selection Committee, was heading to Indianapolis on Tuesday to begin his duties in helping to select and seed the 68 teams that will participate in March Madness this year. He was asked if having the Big Sky’s top-2 men’s seeds lose in the opening games of the conference tournament will negatively impact seeding for whoever ultimately wins the conference title.

“Anytime that your highest teams, your best teams, lose, it’s going to impact your seeding right?” he responded. “The interesting thing is that it happens all over the country. Every year, the No. 1 seed in five or six or eight conferences doesn’t win their tournament. So it depends on, when we get in the room and we’re sorting the teams as far as the seeds go, it depends on who you are compared against. You might be compared against a conference we’ve done better against and that is going to move you up the seed line. Sometimes you might be compared to a team in a conference that did very well and you move down. But obviously a team that wins 24 games is not going to be seeded (as poorly) as a team that wins 12.”

The Big Sky has dabbled in a wide range of tournament formats. About 10 years ago, before it made the decision to admit every conference team to the tournament and hold it in a predetermined site, the conference awarded the top-4 teams byes, and the next four played on the campuses of the fifth and sixth seeds. The survivors would meet at the host school’s campus.

That rewarded the conference regular champions, but created travel headaches for all the schools who qualified for the tournament. Often, the schools didn’t know where they would be playing until the final weekend of the season. That made getting last-minute flight and hotel arrangements difficult — and extremely expensive. One year, when North Dakota was still in the conference and won the right to host the women’s tournament, the ISU women’s team wound up taking a two-day bus trip to Grand Forks to compete.

While some Big Sky fan bases, particularly those that were often in contention to host the tournament, were upset when the league made the decision to select a predetermined site, Wistrcill says it’s unlikely the conference will ever go back to waiting until the end of the season to determine where the tournament will be played.

“The biggest reason is travel expenses,” he said. “If you don’t know you’re going to Missoula, Montana or Pocatello, Idaho until three days before you have to get there, and you’re moving 30 people just for one team, and 60 people for two teams, in that sort of timeframe, logistically and monetarily, it just doesn’t work. There’s not enough flights to some of these places, and the cost is unbelievably expensive. So this way we can plan, and we feel like we can really offer that championship tournament experience for our coaches and players that they want. I don’t see us going back to a home site.”

The conference adjusted its format again last season, giving the top-2 seeds in both the men’s and women’s brackets a day off, while the bottom seeds opened tournament play on Saturday. Then the top seeds met the survivors of the bottom-seeded games on Sunday. In the men’s bracket, both the Nos. 1 and 2 seeds lost to lower seeds on Sunday night. Wistrcill is prepared for criticism of the new format for that reason.

“We said we’d give this a three-year try, because we know people are going to like it or not like depending on how they did,” Wistrcill said. “So like this year, on the men’s side, the No. 1 and No. 2 seeds lost already. People are going to be like, ‘That’s not right.’ But what we’re trying to do is we’re trying to give some reward to the winner of the regular season, and also recognize that the difference between the top and bottom of our league is not very far. You want to have a (good) representative of the whole conference. But then you have to take into account that whoever gets hot is going to win the tournament.”

The Big Sky introduced a new concept in both men’s and women’s basketball during the regular season − the Big Sky-Summit Conference Challenge. Each Big Sky school, both men’s and women’s teams, matched up with a Summit team at home and on the road. The Big Sky men won their challenge, while the Summit women took theirs. Wistrcill felt the challenge was a great success.

“It was great competition, “ he said. “It was so much fun to see our teams play teams they typically wouldn’t play, and everybody got a home game out of it. Typically, we have trouble getting teams to come play us at home. Anything we can do to get a home game is a great thing for our teams. “

As he prepares to head to Indianapolis to begin the NCAA Tournament selection process, Wistrcill’s biggest concern is protecting the tournament, which is the most marketable product college basketball has to offer. There has been a lot of discussion about expanding the tournament, including even some talk of allowing every Division I team into the field. Wistrcill wants to make sure the NCAA keeps March Madness the compelling attraction it is now, where it’s still a privilege to get in the field, but where Cinderella often emerge on that crazy first weekend of the tournament.

“The great thing about college basketball is that it captures the attention of the nation for three weeks in March − March Madness,” he said. “So our biggest threat is we have to make sure we don’t do anything to damage that. There’s lots of talk about expanding the tournament, not expanding the tournament. Could we handle four, eight teams and expand? We probably could handle it, it wouldn’t change it that drastically. But we have to be really careful about damaging anything related to the tournament, because it’s such a special thing. Every team in the country can go into the season saying they’ve got a chance to be that Cinderella, or win a national title…. We’ve got to be careful that we protect that for college basketball.”