Good morning to everybody except Ryan Day and the Ohio State football coaching staff, and thanks for spending part of your day with Extra Points.

I hope you all had a wonderful and restful Thanksgiving holiday. Outside of a few hours on Saturday, I certainly did…but I’m also excited to get back to the home office to try and finish this year off strong.

I want to start with this excellent and thoughtful story by my internet pal Matt Norlander of CBS Sports on the Maui Invitational:

The Maui Invitational is unquestionably a cool event. It’s been the marquee early season men’s basketball tournament, or at least one of the marquee early season tournaments, since the mid 1980s. Historically, it hasn’t had any problem securing the participation of the biggest programs in college basketball, and thanks to ESPN, the event has enjoyed some of the best time slots and exposure of any early season college basketball event.

This year was particularly notable, as Norlander points out, since this was the first time the event has been played in Maui since the island was devastated by massive wildfires back in 2023. Through charity auctions, the Invitational raised over $1.7 million for wildfire relief efforts, and expected to have a local economic impact of “more than $24 million.”

But the event is also unquestionably a throwback to a different era of college sports. While other multi-team events (MTEs) are played in huge, modern arenas, the Maui Invitational is played in the Lahaina Civic Center (capacity: 2,400). And unlike bowl games and some newer basketball events, the schools aren’t getting fat checks to participate.

Via the story:

Coaches and administrators also worried about the toll that the travel to and from Hawaii would take on their players. Take it from me, a guy who flew with the Hawaii football team to Fresno a few weeks ago… I get it. Moving any team to the islands is a huge logistical undertaking, and no amount of comfortable chartered flight travel can undo the impact of time zones.

The opposite of an “old-school” approach to early season basketball tournaments is probably the Players Era Festival, the recently-concluded event (won by the Oregon Ducks) that pledged to pay nearly $9 million in NIL contributions to the participating teams, including a million bucks to the winning program.

Back in March, I wrote that I didn’t think a million dollars in direct NIL contributions would actually be enough to be truly meaningful in basketball scheduling…but it appears I was wrong about that. But we’ve also written a few times, as have plenty of other sport business reporters, that it isn’t clear how an event like the Players Era will actually make money.

Us cynical pencil-pushers aren’t the only ones wondering this… I’ve heard from other MTE operators and college basketball administrators asking the same questions. And here, via the CBS Story, I think it’s fair to say the folks running the Maui Invitational share similar concerns:

Will tournaments like the Players Era become the new standard? Who knows? The folks bankrolling the event can certainly stand to lose money for a few years while the market sorts itself out. But even the profitable rate for NIL payments dropping to five or six figures, rather than seven, would represent a significant threat to the existing business model for events like Maui.

Based on my limited personal experience in athletic event management and from what I’ve learned via my own professional conversations, I think successful postseason or in-season events have to offer a combination of the following things:

You know who likes visiting Hawaii? Literally everybody. Being able to tell your players, many of whom have never visited anywhere remotely exotic, that they’re getting a trip to Maui in late November, is an absolute positive. Is the gym small? Sure, but who cares? Penny Hardaway played in that gym. So did Kemba Walker, Glen Rice, Vince Carter, Damon Stoudamire, and a bunch of other greats of college and professional basketball. That matters!

There are lots of places you can host a basketball MTE or a bowl game. But will players be excited about playing in a convention center in some second-tier Sun Belt city, or a Mountain West football stadium? Not as excited as they’ll be about playing in Hawaii!

Besides being in Hawaii, the Maui Invitational also historically includes stacked tournaments, meaning participating teams will get multiple chances to play against NCAA Tournament-caliber competition. Last year’s event, for example, included Purdue (the national runner-up), Marquette (two seed, sweet sixteen), Tennessee (two seed that went to the Elite Eight), Gonzaga (five seed, Sweet Sixteen), Kansas (Four seed), AND UCLA and Syracuse.

Playing in Maui is usually not only great for a team’s RPI/NET rating, but it also gets them on national television and in the national conversation, something that’s very hard for most teams to pull off while college football season is still happening. Beat writers and national networks still fly to cover this event. You’re not getting that same level of media coverage or exposure playing in the Greenbrier Tip-Off or the Sunshine Slam.

This isn’t the only thing an event needs, but I don’t think we can be ignorant and pretend this isn’t a factor. Most schools can’t afford to burn $400,000 to play in Maui, even if doing so might be beneficial to their program in the short-term. Charter flights and hotels are expensive, missing out on home game revenue is expensive, and roster management and retention is only becoming more expensive. You can’t pay for a director of basketball operations in exposure, or at least, you can’t legally (or morally). That takes money.

It doesn’t have to be cash distributions to an NIL collective, although I’m sure that doesn’t help. But most schools, be they in D-I or D-III, are going to feel a pressure to make sure event participation isn’t going to damage their bottom line.

I think different programs are going to want and need different things out of neutral site events.

If we had gone to Westminster and Marietta, hypothetically, with giant novelty-sized checks for $75,000 to play in the Extra Points Bowl, would they have accepted it? Of course! They need the money! I hope someday, Extra Points is in a position to be able to afford to give a school (or a collective, or whoever it is we end up paying in six years) a giant check, or perhaps a cartoonishly large briefcase full of money.

But I also know that cash wasn’t the reason anybody accepted our bowl bid invite, or why anybody does anything in the D-III bowl space. The first two incentives mattered more.

This thinking extends to the D-I world too! There are schools that would accept less money (or be willing to spend more money), and potentially even less exposure, if it means they can provide a unique and meaningful experience to their athletes and get access to a higher caliber of competition than they could otherwise. If you can’t get a P4 team on your home floor, but you could get them in the Corn Palace, well, you’re booking that flight to South Dakota.

But cash still matters. So I imagine everybody will need to continue to evolve.

Would that hypothetically mean sometimes playing the Maui Invitational in Honolulu instead, to take advantage of a gym nearly five times the size? Maybe? Could it mean shortening the length of the tournament, or finding unique new ways to bring in sponsorship dollars, or creating some sort of new revenue distribution model? Perhaps!

If I knew the exact answer, I certainly wouldn’t give it away for free in this newsletter! The Lunchables my children demand aren’t free, you know.

I think it’s clear the folks at Maui understand that too. Via the story:

Not sure what those changes end up looking like, but hopefully, they’re not so drastic as to make the event unrecognizable.

I think the Maui Invitational is pretty cool. Playing big college basketball games in tiny gyms is cool. Big matchups in November are cool. Making big-time, in-person college basketball accessible for folks in small and remote markets is cool.

Players getting paid is cool too. But I hope there’s still a way to make the math math for everybody.