ARLINGTON, Texas – Western Athletic Conference (WAC) Commissioner Brian Thornton has been appointed to the NCAA Division I Men’s Basketball Committee. Thornton’s five-year term on the committee will officially begin on Sept. 1.
 
The 12-member committee works directly with NCAA Senior Vice President of Basketball Dan Gavitt and the national office men’s basketball staff on the administration of the NCAA DI Men’s Basketball Championship.
 
"I am thrilled for the opportunity to represent our conference on the Men's Basketball Committee,” Thornton said. “I was very fortunate to experience the NCAA tournament as both a student-athlete and a coach, and to come full circle and give back to the tournament from an administrative level will be extremely rewarding. The NCAA tournament is the crown jewel of college athletics and serves as one of the greatest platforms in all of sports. I look forward to being a small part of the most exciting three weeks of the sports calendar."
 
Thornton is the fourth WAC commissioner to serve on the committee, joining Paul Brechler (1968), Wiles Hallock (1969-71) and Karl Benson (2002-06). He is the 10th overall representative from the league, and the first since Scott Barnes of Utah State from 2011-13.
 
Thornton, in his third basketball season as commissioner of the WAC since assuming the post in November of 2021, is currently serving as a member of the National Invitation Tournament (NIT) committee in stewardship of the postseason Men’s NIT during the 2023-24 academic year. Thornton was also named chair of the NCAA DI Men’s Basketball Competition Committee in October of 2023, a group that serves in an advisory capacity with a focus on student-athlete health and safety, sportsmanship and integrity, game operations and presentation, technology and statistical trends across college basketball.
 
To provide more opportunities for quality nonconference matchups and further enhance the WAC’s overall basketball profile, Thornton and the WAC established a scheduling initiative with Conference USA prior to the 2023-24 basketball season. The multi-year scheduling initiative between the peer conferences kicked off with 36 total games, 18 men’s and 18 women’s, featuring WAC and CUSA teams during the inaugural season.
 
The 2023-24 campaign has also marked the second season of the revolutionary WAC Résumé Seeding System that is used to seed the WAC Basketball Tournaments. Developed by Thornton, WAC Associate Commissioner of Basketball and NCAA DI Women’s Basketball Oversight Committee member Drew Speraw and Ken Pomeroy of www.Kenpom.com, the seeding system employs an algorithm that is based on performance throughout an entire regular season and rewards WAC members who face stronger schedules. The system is responsible for seeding the top eight teams for the conference tournament after those teams qualify for the field based on the final regular-season WAC standings.
 
Under Thornton’s leadership and strategic vision for the conference, the WAC has risen from 23rd to 11th according to the final Kenpom.com yearly ranking of men’s basketball conferences at the conclusion of the 2022-23 season. A total of four WAC member men’s basketball teams competed in 2023 postseason tournaments, highlighted by Utah Valley reaching the semifinal round of the NIT in Las Vegas and Grand Canyon representing the conference as its automatic qualifier in the NCAA tournament.
 
Thornton joined the WAC following one year as the associate commissioner for basketball at the American Athletic Conference and two years as assistant director for basketball development at the NCAA national office. Before arriving on staff at the NCAA, Thornton spent nine seasons as a coach at the Division I level that included stops at Xavier University (director of operations 2009-11), Furman University (2011-12), Winthrop University (2012-14) and Ball State University (2014-18).
 
A standout men's basketball player at Xavier, Thornton was the 2005 and 2006 Atlantic 10 Student-Athlete of the Year, a CoSIDA Academic All-America selection and was a first-team all-conference pick for the Musketeers' 2006 Atlantic 10 championship team. He began his playing career at Vanderbilt University, where he was an SEC all-freshman selection in 2002. Thornton played professionally for the Artland Dragons for the Basketball Bundesliga in Germany from 2006-07.
 
 
ABOUT THE WESTERN ATHLETIC CONFERENCE

With its conference headquarters located in Arlington, Texas, the Western Athletic Conference (WAC) has enjoyed longstanding success in collegiate athletics since its formation in 1962 and is currently comprised of 11 full-time member institutions – Abilene Christian University; California Baptist University; Grand Canyon University; Seattle University; Southern Utah University: Stephen F. Austin State University; Tarleton State University; The University of Texas at Arlington; The University of Texas Rio Grande Valley; Utah Tech University and Utah Valley University.
 
Presently, the WAC crowns champions in 19 sports – nine men’s and 10 women’s championships. In 1995, the WAC became the first conference nationwide to have an exclusive broadcast contract with ESPN for football and basketball games, forming a partnership that continues to the present day with more than 500 WAC-affiliated live games and events available annually on ESPN’s digital and linear platforms. WAC member institutions have won a total of 35 team national championships since the conference’s inception.