Dreaming Up Fun MTEs for Fans Who Actually Like College Basketball

We are finally winding down MTE Season – that is, “Multi-Team Event” Season for those just joining us – and the theme so far, sadly, has been Corporate Money.

That shouldn’t be the theme of anything ever, of course. Corporate money and venture capital ruin everything. And just because you’re used to it over the last couple of years – between the College Basketball Crown, the expansion of the NCAA tournament with no recourse for mid-majors to play more high-major opponents, and just about every development in college football, doesn’t mean we have to accept the new reality of college basketball. Looking, of course, at you, Jeff Goodman.

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The Players Era Festival has been all the rage, and though a lot of the media would have you believe it’s the best thing for college basketball since the invention of the shot clock, a lot of true college basketball enjoyers have been seeing through the BS. It’s a sloppy, disorganized event created for a small few television executives and corporate donors who don’t care how sloppy or disorganized it is because it makes them more money. And some of the college basketball personalities you used to think were on your side in promoting the magic of giving small guys their chance were out full bore promoting the thing.

Sure, some of the matchups have been high-powered and, in theory, fun to watch. The small crowds, baffling 18-team structure with point-differential tiebreakers, and unfair distribution of a silly amount of NIL money are not fun. Not to mention the capitalist CBB system, this perpetuates where the rich programs get richer, and fewer and fewer mid-majors get legitimate shots to get statement wins and make deep runs. Now it’s coming out that the Players Era Festival is being backed by a private equity firm with ties to the United Arab Emirates. It’s truly an example of money once again destroying the things we love.

So I’m gonna push back on that a little bit. Why don’t we create fun MTE’s that fans would get a kick out of watching? Tournaments based on regionality? Wouldn’t it be fun to have a “King of the Region” type tournament? How about other things, like a whole tournament with teams having a specific color or mascot?

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Are they going to happen? Probably not, so long as we live in a late-stage capitalist society. Are they objectively amazing ideas? Absolutely.

The ideas for some of these MTE’s, especially the larger ones, were born out of a couple of things. Number one, I love the Big 5’s format of dividing teams into pods, and then having the pod teams play each other based on their finish. Second, I’ve been watching a lot of World Cup qualification this year, and I love the idea of playing a tournament every four years, and seeding it by averaging metrics from the last four years. And yes, especially in the bigger tournaments, while some of the earlier rounds/pool play games may be a bit unbalanced in terms of team strength, by the end of the tournament, there will be good, fun matchups that would be good win opportunities for any team. Besides, every team has buy-games/cupcake games anyway; this facilitates it just a little more.

The Basketball Beanpot

We’re gonna start off simple, like a new rock band easing into their set with a recognizable cover (which, being in a couple of rock bands now, is not something I would advise. Go big or go home). This one isn’t a new idea. The Beanpot, as all Bostonians know, is an annual tournament between the four Division I Boston-area schools, initially and most notably in men’s and women’s hockey, but also in other sports like baseball and women’s rowing. The Basketball Beanpot was actually done before, in the ‘60s and ‘70s, before it fizzled out due to lack of interest.

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Let’s bring it back. And, I would say, no need to hold it in The Garden or anything if we fear it won’t sell out. Let’s do a smaller arena, maybe rotating between one of the on-campus arenas. And Boston College, in anticipation that your supporters may make this argument, your basketball team isn’t now or ever in a position to refuse “playing down” to mid-majors and risking tanking your NET. Your NET is already tanked by default because you’re Boston College. Give the fans a little something to have fun with.

Alternates: MIT, UMass Boston, UMass, the other Massachusetts schools

Tournament for Sainthood

Hopefully, in whatever afterlife does exist, there is no sports gambling. If the Saints are hanging out in said afterlife, though, I imagine they might make playful bets with each other when their teams are in competition on Earth.

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“Hey Joseph, get an actual-size Woj tattoo on your chest if my Bonnies beat you today.”

Something like that.

I’m sure they’d like to know, just like we’d like to know, who the best “Saint” team is in college basketball. So let’s give it to them. With the loss of multiple Saints Francis (Saint Franci? Saints Francises?) over the last couple of years, we now have eight Saint teams in basketball, perfect for an MTE.

With eight teams, you could play it in a few different ways. You could do a standard eight-team, three-game event at a neutral site. You could play one campus game and two at a neutral site. I guess you could play three campus games and one at a neutral site. The geography of the situation is a little tricky as we have five schools in relatively close proximity in the mid-Atlantic region, two on the Mississippi, and Randy Bennett and the Gaels basically halfway to Australia. I vote for three games, three days, one neutral site. And what better place to host than the Holy City: warm and sunny Charleston, South Carolina?

(We were also down for doing the Sainthood Battle: Hispanophone Version with every San and Santa, but most of those were in the same conference, and we’ll see a lot of them in the next MTE proposal…)

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SoCal Cup

I grew up in Southern California and went to games at Pauley Pavilion as early as I can remember, and I had a blast. Especially in the old rickety place, before the sterilizing makeover. Of course, the games against Arizona and SC were fun, not even because the opponents were great, but because they were all in our region: West coast, Pac-10 basketball.

This could quickly devolve into a piece about Pac-12 nostalgia, but really, it’s more about the Death of Regionality in college athletics. Aside from like, the MAC and the Southland and some sprawling western conferences, regionality has largely disappeared. Wouldn’t it be so fun to have a regional MTE?

I always loved the idea of the Big 5 championship, even though it was always weird with five teams, and wished SoCal had something similar. Similarly, I was always fascinated by just how many local teams there were in our region, whose fans would drive a couple of hours to see their Cal State Fullerton Titans or UC Riverside Highlanders put up a fight against UCLA.

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I think an awesome model would be to play a tournament once every four years. In a SoCal Cup year, you could get the average metrics of each team over the last four years, and seed the teams accordingly. Then bracket out the teams into four pods, and play round robin on campus. Similar to the Big 5 tournament, the four first-place teams would play a mini two-game tournament at a neutral site, and the four second-place teams, and so on. Unlike the Big 5 though, which seems to have set pods, I think the bracketing of teams based on metrics over the last four seasons would allow for new, exciting combinations.

A couple more wrinkles that you’ll see here and in some of the other bigger brackets to come – first of all, I think it’s good to move teams around to avoid putting too many teams from the same conference in the same pod. For instance, I switched UCSD and UC Riverside below to avoid having three Big West teams in the same pod (UCSD is moving to the WCC next year). The other thing is the issue of where the campus games will be played. I think, generally, the home team will host, except for one twist, with the top-seeded team playing at the lowest-seeded team. This means that seeds one and two will host two games each, and seeds three and four will host one. The UCLA’s and USC’s of the world probably wouldn’t like playing games in Bakersfield and Northridge, and the corporate money infused into the tournament wouldn’t allow that to happen, but it would be so cool to see the smaller gyms packed to the gills just one time when a big-name team comes to town.

Check out the field below. There is some good basketball here!

Oh, you need a northern version of that, you say? Then instead of a two-game tournament at the Intuit Dome and The Pond, make it a three-game tournament at the Chase Center and the Kings’ arena? And instead of the SoCal Cup name it thePacific Pow-wow? Say no more! (God that name sucks, we’ll come up with something better when the idea is officially adopted.)

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Admittedly, the Northern Region – specifically, incorporating the Oregon and Washington schools – is much more spread out. Fresno State isn’t taking a bus ride to Seattle. But the vision is too good.

Alternates: Southern: UNLV, any of the Arizona schools, Northern: Gonzaga, Washington State, Nevada

Manhattan Madness

One more purely geography-based one for fun, and it’s going to end at the Mecca of college basketball. We’re going to have a battle for the Apple.

I think the fun part here is, who gets invited? TV execs probably want UConn in there, but Storrs is a good three-hour drive from the City. Also, do the New Jersey schools take offense to being lumped in with the New York schools and vice versa?

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Just for fun, instead of doing movable pods like we did for the West Coast, we’re going to try fixed, geographic pods here, slightly altered to allow for a bit more even competition. A bit of intra-conference action going on, but having Hofstra and Stony Brook in anything other than a Long Island pod is just criminal. Apologies to those who take offense to the pod names, I plead ignorance as a West Coast transplant.

Alternates: Marist, Princeton, Connecticut schools?

Generic Cat Fight

If you’re a fan of a team that goes by Wildcats or Cougars, I hate to break it to you that your team’s nickname sucks. You should be embarrassed when your team plays another team with the same nickname and then it gets confusing and then they have to specify which “Wildcats” or “Cougars” they’re talking about.

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So why don’t we take that confusion level to the maximum. Everyone’s the Cougars and Wildcats. Make the commentators sweat a little; they almost can’t use “Cougars” and “Wildcats”, unless they want to make some humorous quip specifying which cats they’re referring to, and there are so many humorous quips per game. It’s like a game of King’s Cup where the question master makes a rule and nobody can point or say each other’s name, except on a live broadcast. Amazing. Also apparently I’m still a high schooler for needing to use “King’s Cup” to make a comparison.

Jokes aside, part of the reason it works is because there’s exactly 16 Wildcat and Cougar teams combined. Here’s the bracket below, with the seeds adjusted slightly based on true seeding principles to allow for slight geographical manipulation. The original seeds, based on the four-year average Kenpom rating, is the seed given.

Also considered: Panthers, Tigers, Lions

The Purple Nurple, presented by Bop-It, specifically the Twist-it knob

Alright, now we’re really going hard, we’re up to 32 teams now. Originally, I didn’t think that many teams wore purple, so I went manually picking through this map and manually catalogued all of the teams until I realized we were getting up towards 30. Originally, I ended up with 30, but on that very day, I so happened to encounter a post from our friends @T3Bracketology on Twitter quizzing their followers and later confirming there are an even 32 teams with some purple.

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So I went for it. I started with the top eight seeds according to their average Kenpom score in the last four years, and from there tried to balance each four-team pool both in terms of average Kenpom and average seed as best I could while keeping some semblance of regionality. Honestly, building this field and organizing the pools specifically was easily the most fun part of all of this.

Nobody would ever agree to this in a tournament this spread-out, but I still think it would be cool for the top seed in each pool to play one road game at the weakest team in the pool. And obviously, it goes without saying, but teams are only allowed to wear their purple-focused home and away jerseys. Any non-compliant teams will be executed. (Looking at you, Clemson.)

Come on! This bangs so freaking hard! Who’s with me!

The ‘Do You Look Good In Orange’ Classic, sponsored by Citizens for A Better Jeff Goodman

Okay, so I know this is literally the same exact thing, but as I said, I had a blast building the pods and I literally couldn’t resist a light-hearted tease of our dear friend and biggest fan, Jeff Goodman. There’s only 31 teams with orange per our friend T3, so congratulations, University of Findlay in Ohio, you get to be our Division II representative (largely on the back of your undefeated National Championship season almost 20 years ago).

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Would Homefield be willing to create a Goodman-inspired merch for the champs?

The Oliver Purnell Classic

Did you know that Oliver Purnell has never been fired from a head coaching job?

This may come as a surprise to anyone that’s not a true Mid-Major Madness old head. Surely, he soured on the Clemson fanbase after three first-round exits in the big dance. And if not that, his five seasons at DePaul, none better than 12-19, got him canned the day after his last Big East tournament exit.

Nope, that man left every job on his own. Truly, it’s one of the remarkable wonders of the world. You could make the argument, naturally, that he is the greatest coach of all time. We need to get all of his schools together, play a little tournament, and celebrate the legend that is him.

Alternates: Radford