Not too long ago, April this year to be exact, the men’s collegiate basketball officially started with the Premiere Cup. This year’s summer tournament was the biggest, and arguably the best, pre-season tournament ever staged since it started. It featured 21 teams including the under-18 national basketball team and teams from Cebu and General Santos were featured in the two month long tournament. After all the smoke had cleared, it was the De La Salle University Green Archers who came out on top of the 21-team field by beating the San Beda Red Lions in a back-and-forth game to win the Premiere Cup.
Coinciding with the Premiere Cup was the Father Martin’s Summer Cup. A tournament that was won by the University of Perpetual Help Delta Altas in a UAAP vs. NCAA finals against the University of Santo Tomas Growling Tigers.
Then came the start of the local collegiate leagues. Over 250 schools split into more than 20 leagues started their regular seasons. The majors, as most of the pundits call them, closed out their basketball seasons with the National University Bulldogs winning the UAAP, the San Beda Red Lions winning a historic 5-peat for the NCAA, and the SouthWestern University Cobras claiming the CESAFI crown after a grueling 5-game series.
Now here we are. The final chapter for this year’s men’s collegiate basketball championship.
The country’s insatiable thirst for crowning a one true collegiate basketball champion gave birth to the CCL back in 2002. The tournament format though has changed year-in and year-out. The initial format of the tournament back in 2002 was a sudden death tournament with the finals being a best-of-3 encounter. The format was then changed to a complicated series of seedings wherein the champions from the UAAP, NCAA, and CESAFI were automatically seeded in the Final Four. The 4th seed was contested in a tournament wherein teams from the UAAP, NCAA, and CESAFI were automatically seeded in various rounds of the tournament while the schools from the other leagues duke it out in the early stages. (Yes it was a clusterfuck of a format)
During the 11 times this tournament was held, the UAAP has dominated the league by winning the national collegiate basketball championship 10 times. The sole loss of a UAAP team came from the 2011 PCCL tournament when the San Sebastian College-Recoletos Stags, led by the Pinatubo trio of Calvin Abueva, Ian Sangalang, and Ronald Pascual, defeated the Ateneo Blue Eagles.
In an interesting statistic, the UAAP also dominated the tournament with the most entries in the final four of the PCCL as seen in this chart:
This year, the PCCL reformatted the structure of the tournament into this:
The Elite Eight are split into two groups:
| Group | A | Group | B |
| UAAP Champions | National University | NCAA Champions | San Beda College |
| NCAA 2nd Place | Arellano University | UAAP 2nd Place | Far Eastern University |
| CESAFI 2nd Place | University of San Carlos | CESAFI Champions | SouthWestern University |
| Luzon-Metro Manila Champion | De La Salle University | Visayas-Mindanao Champion | University of Visayas |
Teams from Group A face-off against the teams from Group B and vice-versa. The Top 2 teams from each group advance to the best-of-3 finals while the 2nd place teams compete in a sudden death 3rd place game.
In a ruling by the Philippine Collegiate Champion’s League organizers, it was deemed that the schools can field players from their training pool teams since most of the schools have been gutted by either the PBA or the PBA D-League. Technically, some of the schools are previewing their men’s basketball teams for next season. So the PCCL this year is like a dessert and an appetizer at the same time!
Without further ado, let’s take a look at all 8 schools that have qualified for the final canto of this year’s collegiate basketball season.
2014 Philippines Collegiate Champions League Primer
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