In theory, maybe the College Basketball Crown has appeal.
Get the eight or 16 best teams that didn’t make the NCAA Tournament, put a quick bracket together and plop them in Vegas. Winner gets a chunk of “NIL money” (wink, nudge) to spread amongst the team. Surely this can work; done right, it may even quell the tide of pro-NCAA Tournament expansion idiots, as a worthwhile consolation prize for those who miss out.
But in Year 2 of the Crown, despite the tournament proactively shrinking itself from a 16-team field to eight, it had major trouble just filling those eight spots.
You are looking live at the tournament that will kill the NIT while simultaneously being sure to die out on its own in the next two or three years.
Who is this for?
Because the answer surely isn’t the fans. No one was clamoring to see Stanford-West Virginia, Baylor-Minnesota or Rutgers-Creighton in the first week of April. And somehow I have trouble foreseeing many student sections boarding a plane for the sole purpose of attending this tournament on Easter weekend (though maybe that’s where Las Vegas’ other amenities kick in).
How many of these teams do you think went .500 or worse in the regular season? If you said “all of them,” funny joke, but also you’re close. Half of them: Baylor (16-16), Minnesota (15-17), Rutgers (14-19) and Creighton (15-17).
See, the tournament organizers wanted to give automatic bids to the two best non-NCAA Tournament teams out of the Big 12, Big East and Big Ten conferences. (This is a Fox project, and those conferences have partnerships with Fox Sports.)
And so many teams passed that we’ve scraped the bottom of the barrel in the Big Ten and didn’t even get a second team from the Big East.
You’re telling me DePaul didn’t even want to celebrate its turnaround (sixth place in the Big East) by taking a trip to Vegas and trying to win some money?
So it’s not for the fans and it’s not for the players, either. Postseason opportunities don’t matter to today’s athletes the way they did a generation or even half a generation ago. North Carolina declining an invite to the NIT in 2023 opened the floodgates for this: statements from coaches or athletic directors about how they were proud of their accomplishments, or they left it up to a player vote, or we’re going to focus on next year.
It trickles down to the third-tier tournaments meant for mid-majors and low-major programs: The College Basketball Invitational (CBI) was canceled this month “due to circumstances beyond our control,” though they cheerily promised to see us next year.
Interestingly, the women’s game doesn’t seem to have trouble filling out a 68-team NCAA Tournament, a 32-team WBIT introduced in 2024 and a 48-team WNIT. The problem is isolated on the men’s side, perhaps because every team now thinks it’s good enough for the NCAA Tournament, much like Notre Dame felt it was College Football Playoff or nothing.
The obvious answer to the question “Who is the College Basketball Crown for?” is the TV network that wants inventory to put up against the real tournament, and the Las Vegas entertainment industrial complex that wedges its way into everything these days.
The irony is that for three of these teams — looking at you, Baylor, Rutgers and Creighton — they spent Thanksgiving week playing in front of several hundred fans in Las Vegas for the Players Era Festival, and now for Easter they’ll play in front of several hundred fans in Las Vegas once more. I suppose it’s better than politely declining, but you can’t tell me it’s how the average college hoops fan wants to see a season end.
