The Players Era Tournament: An Ominous View of the Future

 

On top of everything else, the championship trophy
is so tacky it looks like it was designed
by Donald Trump

Curmie is of a mixed mind about the Geico Players Era “Festival” (i.e., basketball tournament).  On the one hand, there were some really good games between some of the best college teams in the country, with the added bonus for Curmie that, even without their star player, his beloved Kansas Jayhawks went 3-0, including a big comeback win against a ranked team in the third-place game.  On the other hand, the event epitomizes everything (well, perhaps not everything) that is wrong with college sports.

First off, it’s all about NIL money.  If you’re not into sportsball, Gentle Reader, that’s money paid to players as a bribe an incentive to attend a particular university.  That’s in addition to the euphemistically termed “scholarships” they receive.  And we’re not talking about enough to buy a pizza on Saturday night.  Some of these guys actually make more to “go to school” than the NBA minimum salary, which exceeds one and a quarter million dollars for rookies (and higher than that for more veteran players).  It’s no longer uncommon for players to play for four different universities.  The NCAA can talk about “student athletes” all they want; the fact is that elite players aren’t students at all.  They’re mercenaries, largely if not completely uninterested in education, ready to sell their services for the best (short-term) offer.

It could be argued, one supposes, that star players really do generate income for the school: ticket prices, television deals, apparel licensing, and so on.  But even pedestrian players, guys who have no more chance of a professional career in sports than Curmie does, are making more to sit on the bench of a college basketball team than they’ll likely see in the real world for years to come.  Wouldn’t it be nice if universities were as interested in attracting the top chemists or sociologists or journalists or violinists (or…) as they are in making sure that guy who plays a few garbage-time minutes a year for the basketball team is handsomely rewarded?

Yes, Curmie is old and perhaps old-fashioned, but he remembers fondly when athletes actually went to classes and interacted with other students.  They even graduated after attending the same school for four years.  Now, at the top level, it’s rare for a player to return to the roster.  At Kansas, for example, no starters returned from last year, and only one player who got more than mop-up minutes is back… and he entered the transfer portal before re-negotiating an NIL deal already worth over a half a million dollars.

Remember, too, that the very best players are likely to leave for the NBA after even a single season, and foreign players can have played in a professional league in their home country and still be eligible to play collegiate ball here. It’s an absolute mess.

But the structure makes this event even more problematic than others of the type.  Most of these early-season tournaments consist of eight teams, with no two from the same conference.  There’s a standard bracket: if you win your first-round game, you next play someone else who did, too.  Ultimately, the champion wins three games in a row; the second-place team won two, then lost one; third place won, then lost, then won, etc. 

But there were 18 (count ‘em!) teams in the Players Era event, and there were three teams that won all three of their games: eventual champion Michigan; third-place Kansas; and Iowa State, who didn’t even get a chance to play for the extra cash despite winning their first two games, one of them against ranked St. John’s.  We’re talking real money here: $1 million, $500K, $300K, and $200K for first through fourth, respectively: all to go to a school’s NIL budget.  That’s in addition to the $1 million all 18 teams collected.

The first problem is that the first two games for each team were pre-determined, meaning that there was no power-matching until the third round, and you could get to a potential additional payoff without having to beat any of the eight ranked teams in the tournament.  (Kansas did; there were two first-round games between ranked teams.)

But it’s how you get to the third game that matters.  The process of selecting the “4 Kings,” i.e., the four teams who were guaranteed at least an extra $200K in NIL funds, relied ultimately on point differential.  There were, as noted above, five teams that had 2-0 records after the second round.  Michigan destroyed their first two opponents, so they went to the championship game with Gonzaga; Tennessee and Kansas rounded out the top four, with Iowa State fifth.

This system presents several problems, one of which is obvious: there’s an incentive to engage in unsportsmanlike conduct.  Normally, if you’re up by a comfortable margin as time is expiring, you get the ball over midcourt and make no attempt to score.  Now, however, winning the game may not be enough, and you never know whether that one extra score could be worth $200K, the difference between losing the third-place game and not getting to play in it, and between winning that game and losing in the championship round.

A few years ago, a Kansas player dunked the ball when the outcome was no longer in doubt, and he could have just dribbled out the clock.  KU coach Bill Self ripped him a new one and apologized to the opposing team.  In last Tuesday’s game against Syracuse, a Kansas player dunked the ball when the outcome was no longer in doubt, and he could have just dribbled out the clock.  Self was thrilled.  As it happened, those two points were what got Kansas instead of Iowa State into the third-place game, as it gave KU a +21 differential to Iowa State’s +19 (Iowa State would have won the next tie-breaker had both teams finished at +19.  You can’t blame Kansas for doing what they could within the rules to advance, but if Curmie had gone to grad school in Ames instead of Lawrence, he’d be plenty pissed, especially since ISU’s Milan Momcilovic (a very good shooter, by the way) apparently passed up a shot in the final seconds of their second game.

The silly rule also provided an advantage to teams that played later in the day on Tuesday.  In college football, teams want to play defense first if a game goes to overtime because they know what they need to do.  Similarly, teams that played later Tuesday had a better idea whether it would be to their advantage to leave their starters in, slow the game down, etc. 

Perhaps most problematic, although it doesn’t come quite as easily to mind, is what has been suggested about the Houston/Tennessee game.  Quoting Sports Illustrated’s Kevin Sweeney: “as the game came down to the wire, it became increasingly obvious that only Tennessee was playing for a spot in the event’s championship game Wednesday. And even the Vols’ spot was very much up in the air.” 

That’s because although Houston won their first game, it was by a narrow margin, and unless they completely destroyed the Vols, they weren’t going to make it to even the third-place game.  When it became clear that the best they could do was a narrow victory, their mental energy inevitably declined.  Sure, there should still be plenty of incentive to win, and in one sense there’s no excuse, but it’s human nature to let down a little if there isn’t a lot of difference between winning and losing.

And… since the tournament went out of its way not to schedule games between teams from the same conference, it’s not difficult to imagine a scenario in which either that rule had to be abandoned, or a team that earned a higher seeding would be dropped.  For example, Kansas and Iowa State were ranked fourth and fifth after the second round.  If Tennessee had won their first-round game more narrowly, the Jayhawks and Cyclones could have been third and fourth… would they play each other, contrary to what happened in the first two rounds, or would one of them be closed out of the third-place game?  Indeed, it’s hypothetically possible that the top four teams could all have been from either the Big 10 or Big 12.  Luckily (I guess), we didn’t need to find out how such a scenario would play out.

But there’s yet one more complication: because of the bizarre scheduling, teams didn’t find out who or when they were playing on Wednesday until 10:00 Tuesday night.  In a traditional bracket, you’d at least know it was one of two teams; here, it could be any of a dozen or more teams, and you’d have maybe a couple of hours to prepare for that particular opponent, thereby devaluing coaching.  That’s not the way to get the best possible game; it’s how to highlight individual skills over teamwork.  That might work for the casual fan, but not for those who actually know something about the game.

Tournament co-founder Seth Berger claims the goal of this idiocy was to create a format in which “every shot matters, every basket matters, every minute matters.”  That didn’t happen.  And it’s rather predictable that when people pointed out the manifold inanities of the Players Era format, the response was that it was the messaging, not the structure, that’s the problem: “one of the things we have to do is continue educating about why our format is unique and it’s exciting.”  There are mumbles about “work[ing] very quickly to get to a better format,” but it’s clear that the centerpiece of the stupidity, privileging point differential, will remain in an expanded 32-team extravaganza.

What’s sad is that teams will continue to chase the almighty dollar, abandoning the less lucrative but competently managed tournaments in actual destination venues like Hawai’i or the Bahamas.  (Sorry, Las Vegas is not such a destination.  Curmie has been there once, and would have to be held at gunpoint to return.)  College athletic programs have long since abandoned even the pretense of being about students.  This is just one more nail in the coffin.