The Players Era Festival starts Monday in Las Vegas. It’s an 18-team tournament (with a weird format) that pays schools millions of dollars to be there.
How will the title game be decided? Will it ever be financially feasible? Is it responsible for the field of the 2025 Maui Invitational being … lackluster?
Matt Norlander and I answered each of those questions, to the best of our ability, in Sunday’s episode of the Eye On College Basketball Podcast. That part of the show lasted about 32 minutes.
Big tournament, bigger money: How the Players Era event is changing college basketball in just its second year
Matt Norlander
Regardless of how you feel about the Players Era Festival, or more specifically how you feel about how it’s indirectly hurting one of the sport’s cherished Thanksgiving-week traditions, it’s undeniably giving us some interesting matchups. On Monday, we get three games between teams ranked in Monday morning’s updated CBS Sports Top 25 And 1 daily college basketball rankings.
The first one is Iowa State (No. 12) versus St. John’s (No. 14). It tips at 4:30 p.m. ET. The second one is Oregon (No. 18) versus Auburn (No. 23). It tips at 8 p.m. ET. The third one is Alabama (No. 10) versus Gonzaga (No. 13). It tips at 9:30 p.m. ET. Beyond that, in Las Vegas, there’s also Tennessee (No. 22) versus Rutgers, Kansas (No. 25) versus Notre Dame, Houston (No. 2) versus Syracuse and Michigan (No. 7) versus San Diego State.
As you’ll see below, Arizona remains No. 1 in the Top 25 And 1 for the fifth consecutive day thanks to a 5-0 record featuring three wins over teams in the top 15 of the Top 25 And 1 — specifically UConn (No. 4), Florida (No. 6) and UCLA (No. 15). Simply put, right now, nobody can match that body of work. If you’re curious, Tommy Lloyd’s Wildcats will return to the court Monday when they host Denver in a game scheduled to tip at 10:30 pm ET. You can watch it on CBS Sports Network.
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