In theory, maybe the College Basketball Crown has appeal.<\/p>\n
Get the eight or 16 best teams that didn\u2019t make the NCAA Tournament, put a quick bracket together and plop them in Vegas. Winner gets a chunk of \u201cNIL money\u201d (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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n<\/section>\n
<\/p>\n\n 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.<\/p>\n Because the answer surely isn\u2019t 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\u2019s where Las Vegas\u2019 other amenities kick in).<\/p>\n How many of these teams do you think went .500 or worse in the regular season? If you said \u201call of them,\u201d funny joke, but also you\u2019re close. Half of them: Baylor (16-16), Minnesota (15-17), Rutgers (14-19) and Creighton (15-17).<\/p>\n 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.)\u00a0<\/p>\n And so many teams passed that we\u2019ve scraped the bottom of the barrel in the Big Ten<\/a> and didn\u2019t even get a second team from the Big East.<\/p>\n You\u2019re telling me DePaul didn\u2019t even want to celebrate its turnaround (sixth place in the Big East)<\/a> by taking a trip to Vegas and trying to win some money?<\/p>\n So it\u2019s not for the fans and it\u2019s not for the players, either. Postseason opportunities don\u2019t matter to today\u2019s 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\u2019re going to focus on next year.<\/p>\nWho is this for?<\/h2>\n