It’s as if the shadowy figures who finance these things had followed the fans’ beleaguered discourse all Thanksgiving week about the lack of juice at the Players Era tournament in Las Vegas, and then asked themselves, “What if we did a Players Era in the Las Vegas of the Middle East?”
There are many reasons not to organize a college basketball event in a desert metropolis 13 hour flight from New York. The only reason you would prefer something like this is simple. As the saying goes, “The answer is money. What was your question?”
But too many games and tournaments held at neutral venues distance the sport from the campuses and fans it is supposed to represent.
Think about this: Let’s say Dubai welcomes eight teams next year. They will need plenty of time on both ends of the trip to recover, meaning not playing at home. The Players Era has promised to increase the number to 32 teams and distribute their games over three weeks. Supposedly, the teams that win their groups in each of the first two weeks would return to Las Vegas for Feast Week. There are more programming problems; I have to reserve this week, just in case!
Every season, there are complaints about the lack of high-level matchups early on, when major league teams often opt for East Nowhere Tech before heading to Las Vegas or the Bahamas. But let’s take a look at this week’s schedule…
- No. 15 Florida at No. 4 Duke
No. 5 UConn en No. 21 Kansas
No. 16 North Carolina at No. 18 Kentucky
No. 10 Iowa State en No. 1 Purdue
No. 4 Duke en No. 7 Michigan State
No. 20 Auburn en No. 2 Arizona
Georgetown ranked #16 in North Carolina
Some of these were organized as part of the ACC/SEC Challenge, others by the coaches and the schools themselves. All of the above examples were, or will be, played on college campuses.
What the broader debate about Las Vegas and Dubai has overlooked is that a ballroom in the Bahamas isn’t a much better place to play the sport. (With all due respect to Battle 4 Atlantis, but it opened in 2011 and has a very limited history to that of a tournament like the Maui Invitational). It’s best suited for venues full of crazy students like Cameron Indoor and Allen Fieldhouse, because that’s what will keep the next generation of fans hooked for the long term.
If you’re a kid now and consuming sports on TikTok, watching Nate Ament race around the track in a nearly empty venue in Las Vegas, will you become a long-term fan? Or, to put it more cynically, a long-term consumer?
When La Liga reached an agreement to move one (1) regular season game between Barcelona and Villarreal to Miami, the reason was, once again, money. And the players, coaches and fans made such a fuss over the transfer of a Spanish match outside of Spain that La Liga relented.
Unfortunately, a similar change in attitude will not come to the United States. The NCAA offered a very weak response to the potential circumvention of Players’ Era rules, initially introduced when they debuted in 2024. Now, Players’ Era-style megatournaments are taking over and going global, chasing the money.
If you can, catch Duke and Michigan State on Saturday afternoon. If they play again in 2026, it is more likely to be in front of 250 Emiratis, not a return match in Durham.
