By Ferd Lewis
Advertiser Columnist

When you're 2,500 miles from your nearest NCAA Division I opponent and playing in an often-overlooked conference, sometimes you have to go to great lengths for some visibility.

Which is why the University of Hawai'i men's basketball team is in Kent, Ohio, of all places, tonight for Bracket Buster Saturday.

For all the inconvenience that comes with this one-shot, non-conference game four time zones away, playing Kent State on ESPN2 in their first national game of the season, it is still the kind of leap of purpose the Rainbow Warriors have to take once in a while. It is precisely the kind of roll of the dice they should take from time to time.

The Rainbows could have begged off last spring when this whole thing was hatched and pleaded road weariness from a schedule that already takes them the mileage equivalent of around the world and then some. They could have said traveling the width of the Western Athletic Conference, is plenty, thank you. Some people will even tell you they should have.

But that would be to submit to their isolation and perpetuate their invisibility. Between the WAC's minimal basketball television deal and UH's no-name non-conference schedule, the Rainbows' national exposure is usually microscopic, if it is measurable at all.

For a couple years now WAC basketball coaches, Riley Wallace among them, have pleaded with commissioner Karl Benson to get them something, anything, on national cable, to better to advertise their programs.

From those pleadings and talks with other similarly-challenged conferences, the Bracket Buster concept was born and pitched to ESPN, which will televise five games nationally today. The intention is that it be a weekend showcase for 25 Division I conferences that are often overlooked and usually elbowed out of the NCAA Tournament selection process.

With 20 percent of the conferences getting 74 percent of the NCAA Tournament at-large berths over the past five years, the WAC and everybody that wasn't a Bowl Championship Series Conference, saw an opportunity to reach for some attention and perhaps pump up their numbers.

The idea going in was that it might help come NCAA selection time.

Unfortunately for the Rainbows, who have since stumbled to 14-9, their at-large bubble has already burst for this year.

Now, they're in it for the exposure, which when you're the team from out in the Pacific, is something that should be hard to turn down any time.