When the Utah men’s basketball team and 15 other programs tip off the inaugural College Basketball Crown tournament next week, there will be more than just bragging rights on the line.
There’s Name, Image and Likeness cash, too — to the tune of a $500,000 NIL pool.
The 16-team tournament will take place in Las Vegas over four rounds, and for teams that make the final four, they’ll split that pool money.
Here’s how it will break down, as Fox Sports, which has partnered with the Big 12, Big Ten and Big East in helping create the event, explained earlier this week:
- The College Basketball Crown champion will receive a $300,000 NIL package
- The runner-up earns $100,000
- The other two semifinals will each get $50,000
A new venture called the Vivid Seats Ambassador Program is funding the NIL package, bringing a new dynamic to postseason tournaments.
Utah is one of five Big 12 teams competing in the startup tournament that is meant to give schools that don’t reach the NCAA Tournament a chance to compete in a postseason event.
First- and second-round games will be played at the MGM Grand Garden Arena in Las Vegas, while the semifinals and championship games will take place at T-Mobile Arena.
The College Basketball Crown is also meant to rival the longstanding NIT, which currently doesn’t have an NIL package teams are competing for.
“We’re trying to raise the experience for student-athletes,” Executive Vice President of FOX Sports Jordan Bazant said in a release. “College football has evolved in so many ways. There’s no big-game bowl experience for basketball programs.
“We have 12 NBA teams coming to this event, if not more. If you’re in the NCAA Tournament or the NIT, you can’t send someone to every game. At our event, you can, and we’ll have NBA people at every single game. It’s exposure that they wouldn’t otherwise have.”
The Utes (16-16) head to Vegas while going through a transition phase. The school fired head coach Craig Smith Feb. 24 before the end of his fourth season at the helm.
His replacement — former Runnin’ Ute Alex Jensen — has already been named and Josh Eilert, a longtime assistant in the Big 12 who’s in his first season at Utah, has taken over the interim coach position through the end of the year.
That could be anywhere from one to four games for Utah, which opens College Basketball Crown play Monday at 1 p.m. MST against Butler (FS1) in the tournament’s opening first-round matchup.
The winner of Utah-Butler will play the winner of Boise State-George Washington in the second round Wednesday, just one victory away from an NIL payday.
In the NIL world that now dominates college athletics, could tournaments like the College Basketball Crown — with its NIL pool being awarded to winners and/or semifinalists, or perhaps even more — become more the norm?
NIL deals are well entrenched in the collegiate game, and revenue sharing is inching closer to reality.
“Yeah, you’re not gonna put that cat back in the bag. I mean, it’s going in a certain direction, and either you adapt or perish,” Eilert said of the NIL future of college sports, “and so schools are going through different ways of navigating it, but if you don’t start going forward, you will perish.
“You’ve got to kind of embrace the new professional angle of college athletics, and that’s kind of the way it’s going. This tournament speaks volumes to which way it is going, the direction of which college athletics is going.”
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