Is This $9 Million Basketball Tournament the ‘Future of College Sports’?

LAS VEGAS — Men’s college basketball typically arrives with a thud during a packed sports calendar. Football is well underway and the NBA is already quenching hoop fans’ thirst for games; casual fans wait until after the new year to tune in. 

The inaugural Players Era Festival, a six-day tournament brought to life by EverWonder Studio at Las Vegas’s MGM Grand Garden Arena, aims to breathe life into early-season hoops by luring top teams and their fans to juicy non-conference matchups.

But this isn’t the Maui Invitational (or even the Vegas Showdown between top-ranked Kansas and Duke, being held concurrently November 26 at T-Mobile Arena across the street). There’s a big-money difference: Players Era is doling out $9 million total in NIL (name, image, and likeness) money to the eight teams participating.

“If you’re trying to compare us against an in-season college basketball tournament, I think you’re missing what we’re trying to build,” EverWonder cofounder Ian Orefice told Front Office Sports. The tournament’s goal is twofold: launching a brand that reinvigorates fan excitement, but with “an equitable financial model” that rewards players.

Getting to this stage, however, has required Players Era to navigate evolving NCAA rules on money in college sports.

While the NCAA bars players from being paid directly for playing, they can receive money for activities not tied to the games themselves. So the tournament is peppering the schedule with chances to earn NIL money, much of it put up by sponsors like Starbucks and Dick’s Sporting Goods.

Fitting those in has meant extending the schedule beyond a standard tournament. Whereas the Maui Invitational this week schedules teams like Connecticut and North Carolina for three games in three consecutive days, Players Era stretches from Monday through Saturday.

Teams arrived as early as Sunday to satisfy a slew of obligations on Monday: showing up for meet-and-greet sessions before practice, creating content for sponsors by posing for photos and videos, and hobnobbing with VIPs at a gala dinner. There are more NIL opportunities scheduled later in the week—some players may hit the links with VIPs on Friday, and there are opportunities after the final whistle.

So what do players think of the tournament model compared to other NIL opportunities?

Alabama guard Mark Sears, a star in last year’s Final Four, told FOS that NIL opportunities can often be a grind. “Sometimes meet-and-greets, you can be there two hours and you gotta constantly do the same thing over and over,” he said. By contrast, Monday’s obligations weren’t as onerous as he expected. “It was quick and to the point. Everything we did was very fast.”

But does it all add up to $9 million in NIL off the court? 

The skeptical take is that the format is an elaborate show meant to pacify the NCAA, with the real value generated from a three-year TV deal with TNT Sports and filled rooms for MGM during Vegas’s offseason. After all, not every scheduled meet-and-greet led to actual meetings. And fans who wanted to mingle with players needn’t pay for a photo op—they could simply go anywhere in the casino and grab a selfie with the dozens of Texas A&M or Oregon players milling about. (A few hotel guests were amused to discover that the latter team’s players, despite their size, can all fit in one elevator.)

One Players Era exec told FOS that fair market value is whatever the market will pay. With NIL still relatively new and price discovery a work-in-process, who’s to say posing with a Starbucks cup isn’t worth thousands to the coffee behemoth?

Thus far, the players believe it’s worth it. Creighton point guard Steven Ashworth told FOS that while NIL opportunities can run the gamut from Gatorade commercials to “making appearances at kids’ birthday parties,” the Players Era model represents “the future of college sports,” in his view.

“The tournaments that are at the forefront are going to get the best teams to come because it’s the new era, and it’s the only way to get the players to come to their school and to be able to afford them,” Ashworth said.

And the event’s unique calendar could have an upside for players preparing to go pro. “It gives the kids a chance to understand what the professional world looks like,” Rutgers associate head coach Brandin Knight told FOS. “So you do have obligations that you have to meet, and on top of that, you’ve got to go and play the game.”

Editors’ note: Front Office Sports and EverWonder share the same main investor, RedBird IMI.