Somehow, a line buried in a statement from Oklahoma coach Porter Moser about accepting an invitation to the College Basketball Crown — the joke of a tournament in Las Vegas that’s decided to compete with the NIT for no particular reason, because what everybody was of course demanding was a lame version of the NIT — managed to speak volumes about the current state of college sports and college basketball specifically:
“The Crown had a very successful first year in 2025 and is comprised of all high-major teams.” There it is. The idea that the Crown had a very successful first year is so false that the Crown immediately shrunk its field from 16 teams to 8, exactly the kind of thing that says “WE ARE A VERY SUCCESSFUL BUSINESS MODEL.”
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Unless… that was the point? Because the second part of that statement — it’s comprised of all high-major teams — was actually not true in 2025, when Boise State, George Washington, Oregon State, Tulane, and Washington State. (Okay, it’s mean to include a couple of former Pac-12 teams in there. It’s not mean to include a former SEC team; you made your own bed, Greenies.) Shrinking the field means that the Crown, which waited a full 24 hours after the NCAA Tournament field was announced — probably because they actually had to find eight teams to fill out the field. With the Big Ten, Big East, and Big 12 all guaranteed two automatic bids to the Crown… well, let’s take a look.
Okay, Cincinnati opted out after firing its coach, but the next two NET teams — Baylor and West Virginia — accepted the Big 12’s two bids. The Big Ten got all the way down to Minnesota and Rutgers — the fifth- and seventh-best non-NCAA Tournament teams, according to NET — which means five teams definitely declined bids, and Maryland and Penn State might have as well.
The Big East had eight of its eleven teams miss the NCAA Tournament. One of them is playing in the Crown. None are playing in the NIT. (The latter, of course, is pro forma, since teams from these three conferences can only turn down a bid to the Crown if they’re declining all postseason tournaments.) But that’s the real negative here; by creating this stupid tournament and obligating teams from three of the five power conferences to play in it (the SEC and ACC don’t have any contractual relationships with Fox and so can’t be made to play in it), you now have an NIT with just four of the 32 teams playing being from power conferences. And that’s how you get Porter Moser explaining away choosing the Crown over the NIT with “well there are only high-majors in the field.”
Except that doesn’t make any fucking sense on its face because, and I am not going to mince words here, is it really more prestigious to play in a silly tournament in Las Vegas that includes 14-19 Rutgers, that freaking DePaul thought was beneath them, than playing a home game against Davidson in the NIT (as Oklahoma State is doing)? And all of this is juxtaposed next to the Players Era Festival, which is the same concept (no girls mid-majors allowed) but for early-season tournaments, another event with all the charm you’d expect from a power-conference circle jerk played in Las Vegas on Thanksgiving weekend, and brought to you by a lot of entities that are at least private-equity adjacent. In both cases, “NIL opportunities” are the meat shield used by the participants to justify playing there instead of, like, the Maui Invitational or the Battle 4 Atlantis, longstanding Thanksgiving week tournaments that high-major coaches collectively decided they hate because they might run into a dirty mid-major there.
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And that’s all juxtaposed next to a Selection Sunday where the five power conferences claimed all but four at-large bids and spent several weeks arguing that one of those, Miami (Ohio), didn’t deserve a bid in spite of literally not losing a single game until the MAC tournament last week, because the RedHawks didn’t play anybody with a pulse. Which brings us full circle, because the reason why Miami didn’t play anybody with a pulse was not for lack of trying: Matt Brown FOIA’d it and found out that, yes, in fact, Miami did try to schedule a bunch of power-conference teams and those emails I guess ended up in a lot of spam folders because I don’t know how else you spin no response to Miami emailing Pitt specifically about a request Pitt had made for a guarantee game on December 7 (hilariously, Pitt lost to Hofstra instead.)
“The Crown is comprised of all high-major teams” takes on a brand new meaning when you juxtapose it next to a whole laundry list of good mid-majors who played nonconference schedules devoid of high-major competition. Belmont had a 26-6 record that included zero games against high-major teams and just two against any team in KenPom’s top 100 (two conference games against Northern Iowa.) Saint Louis did play three nonconference games against top 100 teams, but two of those were fellow mid-majors Grand Canyon and Santa Clara; the third, Stanford, was part of a tournament and so not intentionally scheduled by Stanford. Tulsa: 26-7 with one game against a high-major (Kansas State.) Akron: 29-5, one game against a high major (Purdue.) High Point: 30-4, zero games against high-majors or top 100 teams.
Increasingly, the power conferences are playing a completely different sport from the rest of the NCAA, and I don’t mean that as a positive. And increasingly, football and basketball are getting walled off from the rest of college athletics. I don’t know where this ends, but I don’t like where it’s going. It’s the LIV Golf model brought to college sports: talk a big game about growing the game while quietly shrinking the game down to only the stars that pay the bills.
