The 12th edition of The Basketball Tournament will take place this summer, with $1 million up for grabs once again for the winning team. The summer competition features a number of teams made up of alumni from various college hoops programs, with past champions including squads of former players at Ohio State, Marquette, Syracuse, Buffalo and Notre Dame.
Active college basketball programs have never played in TBT, but Doug Gottlieb and Green Bay are trying to change that after filing a waiver to the NCAA to allow his Phoenix squad to play in this summer’s competition. The argument Gottlieb makes is that it should fall into the same category as school’s being allowed to take an international summer trip to play exhibition games overseas once every four years.
“When you play overseas, these teams that go to France, Spain, Belgium, whatever, those aren’t NCAA-sanctioned games,” Gottlieb told ESPN’s Kyle Bonagura. “So the NCAA’s argument is, ‘Hey, in summer competition, you can’t play these games in the United States. They’re not NCAA-sanctioned.’ So if I played this exact same game three hours north of here in Canada, it’d be OK. It doesn’t make sense.”
TBT founder and CEO Jon Mugar is unsurprisingly supportive of the idea, even if it starts with a Green Bay team that went 4-28 during the 2024-25 season and failed to win a game in Horizon League play.
“The idea of undergraduate teams or student-athletes participating and competing against retired players or current professionals overseas or any number of other types of teams that we get is really appealing to us,” TBT CEO Jon Mugar said. “We have a long track record of working with and partnering with universities through alumni teams, and now it makes a lot of sense to do that through their actual teams.”
With revenue sharing on the horizon and early season college tournaments like the Players Era Festival offering millions in NIL prize money, the $1 million prize no longer poses the same kind of hard-line issue for the NCAA that it once did. If the NCAA allows the waiver, it would be fascinating to see how many active college teams throw their hats in the ring for TBT inclusion.
Some teams could talk themselves into the upside of participating. Beyond giving their players a chance to play for $1 million, they’d get reps against professional caliber players that could prove valuable. At the same time, the TBT games are quite physical — again, it’s grown men, many of whom are current or former pros — and you’d run the risk of players picking up injuries before the season.
All of that is moot if the NCAA denies the waiver, but if granted, it could provide a unique avenue for college teams to play preseason basketball in a truly competitive environment that goes beyond just an exhibition tour.
Read the full article here
