The madness of March might take on a whole new meaning this time next year.

The already-muddled landscape for postseason college basketball is gaining another new entrant as Fox Sports and AEG have finalized plans to introduce the College Basketball Crown, a new 16-team tournament that will begin in 2025 in Las Vegas.

The event, many months in active development, will feature teams that do not qualify for March Madness. The Big Ten, Big 12, and Big East each will have two guaranteed slots for their member schools, with the bracket then filled out with other at-large participants. Games will be played between March 31 and April 6 next year at the MGM Grand Garden Arena and T-Mobile Arena, and they will be aired exclusively on Fox and FS1. The timing is between the Elite Eight and the championship game of the men’s March Madness. 

The latest effort specifically extends the network’s relationships with the Big Ten, Big 12, and Big East—three conferences for which Fox already holds multiyear rights deals. It also gives Fox an opportunity to be involved in postseason college basketball as men’s March Madness rights are held by CBS and Warner Bros. Discovery through 2032, while ESPN recently renewed rights for the women’s March Madness through the same season.

Fox Sports branded the new tournament a move to “evolve and elevate the sport.”

The tournament is also a blow to the National Invitation Tournament, which has existed since 1938, is owned and operated by the NCAA, and is aired by ESPN. But the NIT is arguably now at its weakest condition in its long history, as 17 schools were said to have declined invitations to the event for various reasons. Not only does the NIT have far less prestige than March Madness, but the event also conflicted with the opening of the transfer portal, and some schools chose to focus on developing their rosters for next season. 

Without the lineage of the NIT or the obvious allure of March Madness, the College Basketball Crown faces an obvious challenge to find a foothold among fans. Other competing events, such as the College Basketball Invitational, hold far less status among fans and schools, and the CBI also requires an entry fee to participate. 

As professional tennis stakeholders consider accepting billions of dollars from Saudi Arabia to potentially merge the top men’s and women’s tours, the billionaires who run said tournaments Stateside, and elsewhere, are left in a holding pattern.

The top men’s and women’s players will be back together again at the Madrid Open later this month, but one needs to look no further than this week’s women’s-only event in South Carolina, where No. 5–ranked Jessica Pegula gave her support for an ATP-WTA merger during an interview with Front Office Sports. That tournament, the Charleston Open, is one of three owned by Ben Navarro, the founder of Sherman Financial Group who carries a net worth estimated to be $3 billion.

Navarro, after trying to buy the Carolina Panthers in 2018, shifted more focus to tennis. In ’22, his family office, Beemok Capital, spent $300 million to buy the Cincinnati Open (formerly the Western & Southern Open). Then last year, he considered a $400 million deal with the city of Charlotte to move that co-sanctioned ATP-WTA out of Cincinnati. 

With deep pockets and a heavy interest in sports, it would seem inevitable that someone like Navarro, whose daughter, Emma, is the No. 20–ranked women’s tennis player in the world, would keep expanding their portfolio. But the uncertainty of what the professional game will look like in the next 12 to 24 months is giving some pause. “It would be hard for us to try and say, ‘Hey, we’re going to try and get there right now.’ We don’t know what ‘there’ is yet,” says Bob Moran, the president of Beemok Sports and Entertainment. “But once we have a better understanding of what ‘there’ is, then I think we’ll regroup and see.”

In the meantime, some tournaments could be missing out on crucial investment. Beemok is contributing $260 million toward improvements at the Lindner Family Tennis Center in Cincinnati and spent $50 million on recent renovations in Charleston. For Beemok, eventual expansion could be another look at Charlotte—a “great city” with powerful fan and corporate bases, Moran says—but it’s clear any new opportunities will make sense only after any theoretical merger takes place. “I do believe we need to be one tennis,” says Moran, emphasizing that bringing tournaments’ rights and governance together would be the “right thing to do.”