For college basketball teams that do not make the cut for the NCAA Tournament, many look forward to the NIT. However, this year, there is another three-letter acronym entering the tournament environment: NIL.
The College Basketball Crown tournament in Las Vegas will award NIL packages to the final four and championship team, attracting talented teams that have performed well in previous March Madness tournaments like Boise State, University of Nebraska and Butler University.
The 16-team tournament represents seven conferences and is hosted by Fox Sports. According to the Idaho Statesman, teams receive “$50,000 for reaching the semifinals, $100,000 for reaching the final and $300,000 for winning the tournament.”
Even the teams that reach the semi-final round will be awarded some amount of NIL compensation.
The College Basketball Crown will take place from March 31 to April 6, with the championship game at T-Mobile Arena scheduled for the day before the NCAA Tournament championship game.
The Big12 commissioner Brett Yorkmark said at a press conference, “We're excited to be part of The Crown. We think it's going to be a first-class opportunity for our student-athletes to showcase their talents. Fox is a wonderful partner of ours. They've been doing football with us for quite some time and next year they distribute basketball games for the first time in years. We're excited to be in the Fox family and I think their tournament's going to be off the charts. I will be in Vegas to kick things off."
While the College Basketball Crown has attracted several teams left just outside the March Madness bubble, not all teams jumped at the opportunity. Ohio State University head coach Jake Diebler, for example, told the Columbus Dispatch, “The timing of the Crown’s not ideal (…) everything else we’ve had going on physically and what we’ve had going on this year that we thought the best thing for us to do was turn it down. The idea of the Crown, I love what they’re trying to do. The timing of it, it’s tough.”
