New York City-area teams left out of March Madness

The closest that New York City area colleges will get to basketball's "March Madness" will be watching it on the television screen.

It's the second consecutive year that New York, home to countless schoolyard basketball legends and a history of top-10 college teams, will be without a team in the national tournament.

Dwindling high school talent, increased national recruiting and even the presence of dormitories at St. John's University may explain why the nation's largest media market will again be unrepresented when the tournament's first round begins tomorrow. Before last season, it had been 33 years since New York metro schools were shut out of college basketball's showcase event.

"You don't want to see any area in the country that in effect has gone down," CBS Sports college basketball analyst Billy Packer said in an interview. "It would be helpful if a Seton Hall or St. John's was a factor, but the city isn't producing the kind of players they used to before to supplement those teams."

Packer, 68, has covered every National Collegiate Athletic Association championship game since 1974. That year was the last time before 2007 that a New York area school wasn't in the tournament.

St. John's, Seton Hall and Rutgers -- the region's Big East Conference schools -- failed to make the National Collegiate Athletic Association tournament's 65-team field. So did New York area colleges such as Manhattan, Fordham, Iona, Hofstra, Wagner, Columbia, Stony Brook and Fairleigh Dickinson.

St. John's has the seventh-most victories on the NCAA's all-time list, with 1,670, and failed to even qualify for its league tournament with an 11-19 record this season.

New York City has a rich basketball history, from City College of New York capturing the 1950 national title under coach Nat Holman to Manhattan's Madison Square Garden hosting the second-most NCAA championship games behind Kansas City's Municipal Auditorium.

St. John's, which lost the 1952 championship game, emerged as a national power under former coach Lou Carnesecca, winning 526 games and reaching the postseason in each of his 24 seasons at the university's campus in the borough of Queens.

A city native known for his colorful sweaters, Carnesecca's 1985 Final Four team was led by local stars such as Mark Jackson, Chris Mullin and Walter Berry, all of whom went on to play in the NBA.

Yet St. John's stature has declined since Carnesecca retired in 1992 and the city's top program has failed to make the tournament the past six years.

Len Elmore, a former NBA center who attended Power Memorial High School in New York, said many area high school players fail to qualify academically for top collegiate programs because of deficiencies in the city's public school system. He said another reason for the decline is a "little-known perk" St. John's no longer offers.

"When you can bunk up with two or three other guys and take the rest of the money, that's a huge draw," Elmore, who played at the University of Maryland, said in an interview. "That opened some guys' eyes. They had money in their pocket and some local kids could stay home and keep it."

South Orange, New Jersey-based Seton Hall, which is 14 miles from New York City and reached the Final Four in 1989, has missed the tournament six of the past eight years. Rutgers, in Piscataway, N.J., last received an NCAA berth in 1991.