Don’t believe the hype! Or at least don’t believe that mere hype will make the Boston University’s men’s basketball program a main attraction (“Athletic Department needs to hype basketball,” Oct. 10, p. 12). It’s been tried before. Twenty years ago, no amount of hype could make a BU-New Hampshire or BU-Hartford hoops game worth viewing, and the same is true now.

BU was a hockey school long before any current students got there. It was a hockey school long before I got there in the 1980s. Why? BU is hockey royalty. With four national championships, scores of NHL talent and dozens of Olympians — most notably of all, the “BU Four” from the 1980 Miracle on Ice — hockey has a history of excellence at BU. The school also has some of the deepest-rooted hockey rivalries in the country. BU men’s basketball plays in what is charitably called a “mid-major” conference — a league in which clubs have scant hope of winning an NCAA tournament game, much less a championship.

A history lesson: When BU basketball plays the big boys, fans take notice. In the 1989-90 season, BU lost a squeaker to national champion University of Michigan and defeated national power Maryland at Boston Garden. Crowds of more than 10,000 attended both games. The Terriers also played and lost at North Carolina State that season. Those games didn’t need hype. They sold themselves.

The BU Athletics Department seems to be doing what it can to schedule quality opponents and raise the basketball profile at the school. But as long as the team plays in a second-tier conference populated by Albany, Binghamton, Stony Brook and the like, it will be hard for anyone to consider BU basketball anything but a second-tier sport. As an alumnus, I’d love to see that change. But as a practical matter, I recognize that it is easier said than done. My advice to the disgruntled columnist: Put on your hockey sweater and get ready for another exciting NCAA tournament run.

Matthew McSorley

COM/CLA ’91