The Basketball Tournament (TBT) is retooling its format in Year 13, and has scored a new media rights deal with Fox to go with it.
On Friday, TBT announced a two-year broadcast rights extension with Fox Sports that will see 20 games aired across Fox, FS1, and FS2. In total, three TBT games will air on Fox, including the $2 million winner-take-all championship game on August 2. Additionally, 14 games will air on FS1 and three games will air on FS2.
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TBT is overhauling its format going into its 13th edition. The tournament, which has traditionally been a single-elimination bracket styled after the NCAA Tournament, will now be split into two brackets, with the first round featuring a best-of-three series. The first bracket will feature eight alumni teams representing Kentucky, Louisville, Kansas, Kansas State, Syracuse, Seton Hall, Wichita State, and New Mexico. First-round matchups will be determined based on historic rivalries (i.e. Kentucky-Louisville, Kansas-Kansas State) and be played in venues close to those fanbases. The second bracket will feature eight non-alumni teams competing in a single-site tournament in Las Vegas. The winners of the Alumni Bracket and the Vegas Bracket will then compete in a $2 million winner-take-all game at the home gym of the Alumni Bracket champion.
The new format is a stark departure from TBT’s previous setup, which tried to emulate March Madness with a 64-team, single-elimination tournament. Now, TBT has culled the field from 64 to 16, hoping that its usual alumni squad strongholds, like Boeheim’s Army and AfterShocks, can continue to deliver built-in audiences of basketball obsessives from those schools.
Last year’s championship game on Fox, which featured the AfterShocks, averaged 444,000 viewers, a 67% year-over-year increase from the previous championship game, also on Fox.
It’s unlikely TBT will ever recapture the magic of its first few years, when the concept was novel and intriguing for college basketball fans stuck in the middle of the offseason, but the fact that it still exists in its 13th year is a success story itself. And for the third consecutive year, its championship will air on broadcast television. That’s pretty remarkable for an independent basketball tournament played in the middle of summer.
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