The Players Era Festival sucks and the fullcourt press in college basketball media is gross

Vanderbilt plays in the Battle 4 Atlantis this week, typically one of the greatest early-season college basketball tournaments, except that this year the field features Western Kentucky, VCU, South Florida, Colorado State, Virginia Tech, Wichita State, and Saint Mary’s: quality basketball teams, but hardly the big brand names that you normally associate with this event.

The Maui Invitational, which normally features a loaded field, this year features Arizona State, Boise State, NC State, Seton Hall, Texas, USC, and Washington State: a solid field, but hardly the Maui of old.

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Last year, Vanderbilt played in the final Charleston Classic that featured an eight-team bracket. This year, the Charleston Classic split into two four-team brackets.

Just what the hell is going on here? Matt Norlander at CBS Sports named the culprit: the Players Era Festival, an 18-team event that next year wants to have 32 teams, but which doesn’t feature a bracket like any fun college basketball tournament does. It features, uh, two scheduled games with a third game that they somehow determine but not by a bracket, which again, any real college basketball event should. It’s being played in Las Vegas, which is where like five conferences have chosen to hold their conference tournaments, and the same place that the nonsensical College Basketball Crown was held for shitty Big Ten, Big 12, and Big East teams to play instead of the NIT. Why every shitty soulless college basketball event is in Las Vegas, I don’t know, except that I guess that’s a place for soulless people to congregate. It’s certainly not Maui, or the Bahamas, or even fucking Charleston.

So who’s behind this? Glad you asked.

“As a college basketball nut, I genuinely believed, and still believe, of course, there’s an opportunity for a major college basketball event in November,” Players Era co-founder Seth Berger told CBS Sports.

Berger birthed the idea in the summer of 2023, banking on a hunch that college…

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Publish date : 2025-11-24 03:29:00

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