Niagara University reaped benefits from being one of the two worst teams in the 2007 NCAA basketball tournament. Attendance and revenue rose after the Purple Eagles won the first game of the championship.

“It’s basically a two-hour commercial,” Athletic Director Ed McLaughlin said in a telephone interview from the campus of the 4,150 enrollment school just north of Niagara Falls, New York. He said his school’s appearance in the game, while the rest of the 65-team field was idle, netted $1.5 million in free publicity.

The benefits for Alabama State and Morehead State, who meet tonight in Dayton, Ohio, to start the National Collegiate Athletic Association’s men’s basketball tournament, will extend beyond the court, McLaughlin said. Winning the opening-round game -- contested between the bottom two seeds on a night when the rest of the 65-team field is idle -- and moving on to face a regional top seed can help increase ticket sales, bring in more money from donors and draw recruits.

For Niagara, a Catholic liberal arts school, the number of athletic donors rose 21 percent, basketball attendance went up 26 percent to 2,112 a game and athletic department revenue increased 41 percent the following year. Niagara beat Florida A&M 77-69 in first game of the 2007 tournament, then lost its next game to the University of Kansas 107-67.

“It’s the only game in the country that night,” McLaughlin said. “Can you name the other three No. 16 seeds in the tournament? I can’t. But everyone knows who is in the play- in game.”...

Spread the Word

The exposure gives a once-in-a-decade opportunity to spread the word about a school, said Eric Wright, vice president of Joyce Julius & Associates, an Ann Arbor, Michigan, company that measures the advertising value of sponsorships at sports events.

“In that local region, the team will enjoy a lot of coverage, plus some national coverage you wouldn’t get any other way,” Wright said in a telephone interview. “But the real value comes if you win that game and advance to the regional.”

CBS analyst Clark Kellogg, a former Ohio State player who earned All-Big Ten and Most Valuable Player honors, said the opening-round game has become an integral part of the tournament, which also is known as March Madness.

“It is part of what makes the tournament special, and for that small slice of the pie, clearly, it adds more than it subtracts,” he said on a conference call. “Even though the (odds) are stacked against those teams, the fact that there might be lightning in a bottle is part of the appeal.”

Monmouth’s Win

The opening-round game gave Monmouth University, a liberal arts college with 6,000 students in West Long Branch, New Jersey, its first NCAA tournament victory since the school was founded in 1933. Monmouth beat Hampton University 71-49 in the 2006 tournament opener. The Hawks then came closer than any other opening-round winner to beating the regional top seed they faced next, falling to Villanova by 13 points.

Athletic Director Marilyn McNeil said that while she didn’t see a surge of season ticket sales or applications the following season, on campus “there was a feeling that, ‘Yes, we are a good program.’”

The school, which is moving out of 44-year-old, 2,100-seat Boylan Gym and into a new multipurpose activity center that seats 4,100 next season, recently held an alumni event to mark the closing of the old arena.

McNeil said the alumni’s greatest memories were about winning big games in Boylan and getting invited to the NCAA tournament. No one remembered the score, she said, and some couldn’t even remember whether they had won or lost.

“It’s the journey, not the end result,” she said in an interview. “That’s what you want to applaud and get excited about. Only one team finishes the NCAA tournament without a loss.”