Vanderbilt plays in the Battle 4 Atlantis this week, typically one of the greatest early-season college basketball tournaments, except that this year the field features Western Kentucky, VCU, South Florida, Colorado State, Virginia Tech, Wichita State, and Saint Mary’s: quality basketball teams, but hardly the big brand names that you normally associate with this event.
The Maui Invitational, which normally features a loaded field, this year features Arizona State, Boise State, NC State, Seton Hall, Texas, USC, and Washington State: a solid field, but hardly the Maui of old.
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Last year, Vanderbilt played in the final Charleston Classic that featured an eight-team bracket. This year, the Charleston Classic split into two four-team brackets.
Just what the hell is going on here? Matt Norlander at CBS Sports named the culprit: the Players Era Festival, an 18-team event that next year wants to have 32 teams, but which doesn’t feature a bracket like any fun college basketball tournament does. It features, uh, two scheduled games with a third game that they somehow determine but not by a bracket, which again, any real college basketball event should. It’s being played in Las Vegas, which is where like five conferences have chosen to hold their conference tournaments, and the same place that the nonsensical College Basketball Crown was held for shitty Big Ten, Big 12, and Big East teams to play instead of the NIT. Why every shitty soulless college basketball event is in Las Vegas, I don’t know, except that I guess that’s a place for soulless people to congregate. It’s certainly not Maui, or the Bahamas, or even fucking Charleston.
So who’s behind this? Glad you asked.
“As a college basketball nut, I genuinely believed, and still believe, of course, there’s an opportunity for a major college basketball event in November,” Players Era co-founder Seth Berger told CBS Sports.
Berger birthed the idea in the summer of 2023, banking on a hunch that college basketball had not yet taken advantage of the November calendar in the NIL era.
A college basketball nut? Sounds good and all, buuuuuuuuuuuuuut let’s take a look under the hood:
Berger, 58, brought previous business chops that enabled him to dream big. He co-founded AND1 in the 1990s
Oh. AND1. He calls himself a college basketball nut, but AND1 is a brand I associate much more with AAU ball, and that’s where you get an early-season tournament with all the charm of an AAU showcase in a sweaty gym.
For the past 19 years, his love for hoops has continued to run his life, as he’s been the varsity boys basketball coach at Westtown School, a prep academy in West Chester, Pennsylvania. Among the nearly 30 Division I players who’ve played for Berger
So as per usual, the chaos agents in college sports are people with zero experience in college sports. But Norlander focuses most of his story on Berger, because somehow the guy who created AND1 is the best character behind the Players Era Festival. Let’s take a look at the About page on the Players Era website and… oh.
Players Era was created by EverWonder Studio and Seth Berger. The first ever festival was hosted by partner MGM Resorts International at the iconic MGM Grand Garden Arena. EverWonder is a new independent content studio led by Emmy and Peabody Award-winning producer Ian Orefice – the former President of TIME and TIME Studios – and backed by RedBird IMI and Jeff Zucker – the former President of NBCUniversal, CNN, and Turner Sports.
Berger is the closest thing to a basketball guy associated with this, and he’s not really a college basketball guy so much as a streetball apparel purveyor and coach of a basketball-factory prep school who probably doubles as an AAU coach. EverWonder Studio was the company behind the Netflix-broadcasted “boxing match” between Mike Tyson and Jake Paul, which millions of people bought only because they find Jake Paul obnoxious and wanted to see him get knocked the fuck out by Mike Tyson, which sadly didn’t happen because the universe hates us. RedBird IMI is… a joint subsidiary of a private equity firm and a state-funded investment enterprise of the United Arab Emirates, and for those of you who had the Emiratis rather than the Saudis or Qataris here, congratulations, you win this round of “Which Gulf Oil State is Ruining Sports With Money This Time?”
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That also explains the absolutely gross full-court press from a lot of the media covering college basketball. Norlander eventually did get around to bringing up all the different groups involved in this nonsense while treating them as good players and not “literally a guy who created a pay-per-view fight between a retired boxer in his 50s and a YouTube dipshit who everybody would like to see get punched in the face by prime Mike Tyson but unfortunately the best we could do was Mike Tyson pushing 60.” Somebody has to be paying these people for their words.
And college football has a lot of this, too, but at least college football has prominent media members willing to call out the soulless crap ruining the fabric of the sport in the name of money. College basketball has none of that, with Matt Norlander’s article being the closest we get to “yeah the players and coaches and schools want money, but this sucks shit and we wish this weren’t happening.”
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Remember, LIV Golf had a lot of golf media running interference for that crap and the PGA Tour making some changes to compete with it, and this is the LIV Golf of early-season college basketball (with the College Basketball Crown being the LIV Golf of postseason college basketball, where the NCAA Tournament is the PGA Tour and the NIT is the European Tour; LIV Golf has turned out to be a minor annoyance for the former but a big problem for the latter, for what it’s worth.) This is the same thing. You don’t have to cheer while the soul of the sport gets killed because the players, coaches, and the Emirait government like the soul of the sport getting killed off in the name of the money. You can say that this sucks for fans.
I’ll expand on this lovely rant I had back in May in response to the shitty College Football Playoff multiple-auto-bids-for-favored-conference proposal:
Understanding the bottom line more than why the fans care is how you get stupid crap like every big non-conference game and most of the bowl games being played at a neutral-site NFL stadium, where the best-case scenario is Lambeau Field once in a while, but most of the time it’s one of the generic interchangeable massive enclosed or semi-enclosed stadiums (AT&T Stadium, Mercedes-Benz Stadium, Mercedes-Benz Superdome, Hard Rock Stadium, SoFi Stadium, Allegiant Stadium… they all kind of run together, really. How the people running college football haven’t managed to move the Rose Bowl to SoFi Stadium is unclear.)
(Side note: a few months later UCLA would literally try to move its home football games from the Rose Bowl to SoFi Stadium and is getting sued by the City of Pasadena for sucking the soul out of the sport, I mean breach of contract.)
And now, we get Tom’s Universal Rule For Understanding All Of This Crap:
Fan enjoyment of a sporting event is inversely proportional to player/coach enjoyment of a sporting event
Because as always, the quotes are telling. Beneath all the “look how much money we’re making and how dare you criticize us for doing the thing that lets our athletes make more money” there’s a lot of bitching about playing three games in three days and not having control over scheduling and saying without saying that they want to avoid playing dirty mid-majors. LIV Golf paid nine-figure guarantees to some of the (at the time) top players in the world and also told them they would only have to play three rounds and wouldn’t have to play 18 earlier in the week with random members at the golf club where the tournament is being held — a thing that a non-zero number of former PGA Tour golfers complained about when they made the jump to LIV. The PGA Tour itself responded to LIV by making sure that their top players compete in the same tournaments more often — probably overall a good change but also one that ensures that the grinders who will hold a PGA Tour card for a decade without winning will compete with Scottie Scheffler and Rory McIlroy less often. Vanderbilt is currently good at a lot of sports by exploiting the same reality that basically ensures that a Ted Skuchas will never happen again.
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You don’t have to pretend that rendering sports soulless in the name of making more money is a good thing for any of us, just like nobody has to pretend that replacing humans with AI chatbots who wlil do a worse job at being humans is a good thing for humanity. Efficiency is bad. Embrace Ludditism.
You read Anchor of Gold, after all.
