On March 8th, Front Office Sports reported on a new MTE (MTE’s are those early-season nonconference college basketball events like the Maui Invitational and the Battle 4 Atlantis). The tournament would happen in Las Vegas and would guarantee one million dollars in NIL payments to each team, with an additional one million paid to the champion. For a 13-player roster, this comes out to roughly $75,000 per player, or roughly $150,000 per player on the winning team. That’s a significant amount of money in today’s NIL climate.
Yesterday, CBS Sports provided an update. Teams have committed: Alabama, Houston, Notre Dame, Oregon, Rutgers, San Diego State, and Texas A&M are in, with one TBD Big East school reportedly coming soon. The thing has a name: The Players Era Festival. And so far, the NIL promises haven’t faded.
The event is scheduled to take place the Tuesday, Wednesday, and Friday of Thanksgiving week. The event is unaffiliated with Fox Sports or ESPN, instead likely being broadcast through one of the prominent streaming services. Because organizers view ‘pay for play’ as against the rules, they’ve said players will “be required to participate in multiple off-the-court activities to earn that NIL money.”
Will it work?
My own back of the envelope math in March suggested that a 12-game MTE with comparable viewership to the Maui Invitational would generate around ten million or fifteen million dollars in TV revenue. This was a low-confidence estimate, but it should land within an order of magnitude of the truth. The concept of an MTE paying nine million dollars to its players holds up, then, at least in theory. Running an MTE can’t cost that much, and with streaming services fighting one another to get into college sports, expectations for a slight overpayment lie within the realm of reasonable optimism. Sponsored off-the-court events would, of course, add more income, and the effort is backed by an Emirati private equity firm, one who likely views this as a cheap, high-upside gamble and is willing to lose a little money investing in it.
Still, I’m personally skeptical.
On Tuesday and Wednesday of that week, the Maui Invitational will feature games involving UConn, North Carolina, and Michigan State, each a bigger college basketball brand (to casual fans) than any of the confirmed participants. On Wednesday and Friday, the Battle 4 Atlantis will include Indiana, Gonzaga, and Arizona. Also on Friday, the event will compete against college football, and against the NFL’s Black Friday game. Playing games on a streaming service makes sense during the regular season, when you can slowly pick off subscriptions from individual fanbases. During a holiday week that’s one of the busiest weeks of sports in the whole calendar year? I would guess more viewers are flipping channels than seeking out a million-dollar match between Houston basketball and Alabama.
There’s also this persistent Las Vegas thread. The college basketball industry has become enamored with Las Vegas in recent years. Five conferences play their tournaments in Las Vegas. The NIT tried playing its Final Four in Las Vegas. Fox Sports is putting its ersatz NIT (credit to Matt Norlander for the phrasing) in Las Vegas. Multiple MTE’s are already played in Las Vegas, along with occasional standalone nonconference games, like Gonzaga vs. Duke in November 2021. Of these, my impression is the only ones which have successfully brought fans into the building are the Mountain West Tournament and one or two of the standalone games. The Super Bowl did wonderfully in Las Vegas. The Super Bowl is the Super Bowl. This is Rutgers playing San Diego State.
This is an issue with MTE’s across the board: Attendance sucks. The Maui Invitational is known for its atmosphere, but the Lahaina Civic Center seats 2,400 people. It’s easy to fill up. Lahaina itself is a small town, one where a seismic influx of tourists isn’t required for the tournament to “take it over.” MTE’s are made-for-TV events. The specific neutral sites are most often simply part of the branding, or a nice carrot for the teams involved.
That carrot, though, is where the Players Era Festival becomes relevant. Because while viewership and attendance are likely to be poor, and while off-court sponsored events are a dubious promise, what basketball program wouldn’t want to play in this thing? Take Notre Dame, a basketball program perceived as constantly outbid in the NIL era. This $75K per player isn’t tied to what Notre Dame boosters think of the concept of paying college athletes. The athletes get it, free of donor persuasion on the part of the athletic department. $75K isn’t enough to land a high-profile transfer, but it sure helps close the gap, and with at least some schools reportedly signing three-year agreements with the MTE, the promise of that money is just as ironclad as any donor or collective’s offer.
The Players Era Festival is a poor business model. It’s trying to compete with other MTE’s by spending an absolutely massive portion of its revenue recruiting teams to play. Its most plausible path to success is to establish itself as so dominant in the space that it becomes the premier college basketball event of the regular season, edging out all other non-conference tournaments to the degree it becomes a household name. Can it beat out the Maui Invitational? Maybe. If it can consistently field half the sport’s bluebloods and the lion’s share of the rest of each year’s preseason top ten, it’s conceivable that it could become the biggest one of these events, to the degree where the $9M it’s handing over to players becomes a worthwhile investment. But if I were a private equity partner hearing this event’s pitch, my reaction would not be to invest. My reaction would be to get those pitching out of the room as quickly as possible so I could try to buy the Maui Invitational, which is already recruiting great teams to play without spending that extra $9M. If these guys think an event like Maui has $9M in revenue it can spare, I’d prefer to be invested in the business that captures that $9M as profit, rather than effectively spending it as marketing.
But!
It does have a chance.
If one streaming service is hungry enough for college basketball inventory, and if the private equity firm is detached enough to not desire immediately great results, this thing could have a long runway. Over time, it could grab the best programs and biggest brands in the country as annual partners, choking out Maui and Atlantis. Big budgets can make things happen.
Also?
Even if it fails, it could change the industry.
It wouldn’t be surprising to see ESPN start attaching NIL to some of its own MTE’s, fearing this thing, or to see Maui and Atlantis do the same independently of their TV partner. The question, of course, would be how much money these events could spend before the effort becomes unsustainable for their organizers. But some sort of NIL attachment to MTE’s is a likelier outcome than the Players Era Festival being a tournament watched by Generation Beta.
Ideally, this escapade results in athletes capturing more of the TV revenue they generate. Most likely, the Players Era Festival runs its course, and college basketball remains largely unchanged. Private equity can invest a lot of money into sports. It can’t magically generate more consumer interest.
Should High School Baseball Players Dodge the Draft?
Major League Baseball reportedly sent a memo to its franchises discouraging them from telling kids to drop out of high school and establish residency in a foreign country. Why would MLB send this memo? Presumably, they’ve caught wind of teams telling kids to drop out of high school and establish residency in a foreign country. Why would teams tell kids to do this? Presumably, they’d have an easier time signing the players as international free agents than collecting them in the MLB Draft. Why would a kid do this? Presumably, they’d be betting on themselves being able to make more money this way, and/or they might want to choose the franchise for which they play.
Generally, we’d hope that the kids in question are being advised by smart people. It’s a whole lot of trouble for a 17-year-old to establish residency in a foreign country. Being able to choose your farm system, as a baseball player, is highly valuable, potentially far more valuable than any difference in signing bonus (especially now that MLB’s imposed such a hard spending cap on international free agent signings). Developing under the Dodgers rather than the Pirates? A gift. But it’s easy to see how this could go wrong. It is a situation ripe for deception.
At its core, this is another black eye for drafts in sports. The Major League Baseball draft system is such that it’s conceivable a player could better his financial situation and professional prospects if he were to drop out of high school and go live in the Caribbean. That’s ridiculous. Now, MLB owners are basically telling other MLB owners, “Don’t point out to kids that they can do that.” Yet again, owners who want to make money losing outnumber those who want to spend money and win.
The Rest
MLB:
- Speaking of Pirates minor leaguers, Paul Skenes will reportedly make his debut on Saturday. Skenes was notably not quite as promising of a prospect as Jackson Holliday at the end of last year, but he is a huge name as far as MLB prospects go, and his career minor league ERA is a very good 1.85 over 34 career minor league innings of work. He was a big name in college. He is a big name now, as he enters the major league ranks. His debut is newsworthy.
- Willson Contreras broke his arm last night trying to better frame pitches. He got too close to the plate and committed catcher’s interference, allowing his arm and glove to be hit by the batter’s swing. To an extent, this is on Contreras, but J.D. Martinez also had his back foot out the back of the batter’s box, which shouldn’t have been allowed and should be an easily reviewable and therefore challengeable play. Bad look for the Cardinals, yes, but bad look for baseball as well. Bad look all around!
The NHL:
- What a night of hockey last night. The Rangers’ overtime winner at Madison Square Garden. The Avalanche’s comeback from a 3–0 deficit to win in overtime in Dallas. Hockey stole the show. Between those games and the Cubs, I did not have the sound on for a minute of basketball.
- We continue to suspect the Bruins of being undervalued and the Oilers of being overvalued by betting markets and the narrative, which is a funny thing about hockey: It’s rare to find big-market and small-market teams in those positions on the over/undervalue spectrum. Maybe this means we’re wrong.
The NBA:
- So Luka Dončić’s knee is going to be a problem, eh? That seems to be the primary takeaway from last night. Tonight, the question is how much Mitchell Robinson’s injury hurts the already depleted Knicks. The Pacers might find their way to these Eastern Conference Finals after all.
Chicago:
- The Cubs took a tough loss today, failing to do anything at all on offense (though they narrowly avoided a no-hitter thanks to Yan Gomes’s infield single in the third). Dylan Cease pitched for the Padres, so there was the predictable smattering of complaints that the Cubs traded him in the José Quintana deal, complaints that often come from the same crowd who gets mad when the Cubs don’t spend a billion dollars every offseason. Aggression is desirable in the present, but it sure is foolish when it happened in the past. Anyway, this feels like a good time to point out that last night’s three heroes—Michael Busch, Shōta Imanaga, and Cody Bellinger—were all acquired by the Jed Hoyer regime within the last two offseasons.
- The Blackhawks landed the second overall pick, which is slightly better than the probabilities had it. That’ll kick off five picks in the first two rounds for the franchise, and seven in the first three. At the moment, the only names I’m seeing for the second overall pick in mock drafts are Ivan Demidov, an 18-year-old winger from the KHL, and Artyom Levshunov, an 18-year-old Belarusian defenseman coming off his freshman year at Michigan State.
- Prior to the lottery, the Blackhawks signed Lukas Reichel to a two-year contract. He was already effectively under club control for next year, but this locks in his price for 2025–26 in case he figures it out next season.
- Angel Reese is healthy, but the Sky’s other two top picks—Kamilla Cardosa and Brynna Maxwell—will both miss the first month or so of the season with a shoulder and a knee injury, respectively. I wonder if the absence of an offseason after the college year increases injury risk at all.
