NIL-driven tournaments could be a game-changer on future holiday hoops schedules

Maui, Hawaii, is one of Gonzaga coach Mark Few’s favorite places on the planet and, as last week reinforced, Paradise Island in the Bahamas is aptly named as the site of the Battle 4 Atlantis.

Former GU assistant Tommy Lloyd, now in his fourth season as Arizona’s head coach, also is a big fan of the Maui Invitational and the Battle 4 Atlantis, considered the two premier destinations for Thanksgiving week basketball tournaments.

Roughly 2,500 air miles away from those tropical locales, the Players Era Festival debuted in Las Vegas, symbolic of the changing economic landscape in college sports. The tournament attracted a strong eight-team field and guaranteed a minimum NIL payout of $1 million to participating schools with additional NIL opportunities for players and teams.

Is there room for traditional tourneys like Maui, a mainstay for four decades, and the Battle 4 Atlantis, which began in 2011, to continue thriving and/or co-exist with NIL-driven counterparts? Will NIL-driven tournaments have staying power and become regular additions to the holiday tournament slate?

“Listen, Atlantis and Maui really have done a great job of creating a must-go-to event, very much like Maui with the fields they attract,” Few said Nov. 26, prior to the Zags going 2-1 in the three-day tournament in the Bahamas. “So I think these two are pretty solid.

“And for those of us at the highest level that kind of want to be involved in some (tournaments) that are great places to go to, obviously this is a wonderful, beautiful resort and a great part of the world, much like Maui, but yeah, everybody’s’ adapting. Programs are adapting, coaches are adapting, promoters are adapting, but it’s a changing world, so we’ll see.”

Gonzaga is penciled into the 2025 Players Era Festival in Las Vegas, along with Baylor, Michigan, Iowa State, Syracuse and St. John’s. Oregon, which defeated Alabama in the 2024 title game, earned $1.5 million in NIL while Alabama pocketed $1.25 million.

“I think there’s definitely some threat to the model,” Gonzaga Athletic Director Chris Standiford said. “We’re going to have to figure out what the new rules are going to be, so we’re trying to understand the revenue-driven model that Vegas represents versus these historical, more destination-driven models and figure out what the rules in the future will permit or restrict.

“And then we’ll have to make educated guesses in the meantime, as most things we’re doing right now. But I think we’ll have some strategic vision toward the future. I hope we fall back to this (destination-driven) model. These are great experiences for our student-athletes and coaches.”

Standiford planned on checking in with several schools to learn more about the Players Era Festival following the debut tournament.

“We’re committed to being there next year,” he said, “but we’ve left ourselves some flexibility if the rules change.”

Change has been a constant in college sports the past several years with the transfer portal, NIL and conference reshuffling. After UConn went 0-3 in Maui last week, coach Dan Hurley vowed to never play in another three-game multiteam event (MTE). He said he’d consider smaller, two-game events.

“What’s hard is these tournaments you play three games in three days, it takes a lot of out of your team,” said Lloyd, whose Wildcats finished 1-2 in the Bahamas. “The challenging thing is the other time you do that is when? The conference tournament. The ultimate ways you’re probably going to be judged is the regular season, conference stuff and the NCAA Tournament and then the conference tournament, too, is a big deal.

“It just puts a lot of stress on your team in preparing them, but hey, it is what it is and we’ve been doing it for a lot of years. So I am interested if some small changes start taking place in the next couple years with these MTEs.”

There are financial considerations for teams that compete in Maui or on Paradise Island. The price tag for some schools participating in Maui this year was more than $400,000, according to Matt Norlander of CBS Sports.

At some point, will top holiday tournaments in Maui and the Bahamas begin offering incentives or distribute NIL dollars to continue drawing quality eight-team fields? That likely depends on whether the Players Era Festival or similar events become annual tournaments.

“Certainly,” replied Standiford, when asked if NIL-sponsored tournaments are appealing to college basketball’s best programs. “Right now, what we’re seeing in Vegas is very corporate-driven and it’s a model that others may replicate. I haven’t heard anything that’s particularly trendsetting around that. It takes a lot of capital to do something like what they’re doing in Vegas. It’s really about does that model become sustainable, and we’ll learn more from the operators.”

Those answers will come over time.

“I wish I had a crystal ball,” Lloyd said. “It’s so many changes, it’s hard to understand what’s right and what’s wrong. I’m glad it’s going in the direction where players are part of it now. There’s so many people grabbing at so many things, but you know what I want to do?

“I want to just play basketball tomorrow, I want to be in a tournament. I know one team is going to win a championship and I want to compete for that. Anything outside of that is a little bit outside of my wheelhouse. I know a little bit about these tournaments you’re talking about. Of course we had phone calls. I just don’t know what’s real or not real.”