Unbelievably, The Basketball Tournament tipped off its 12th year last week. The 64-team, $1 million winner-take-all competition has been a staple of summer sports viewing for over a decade, and it has surely had its moments.<\/p>\n
In the mid-2010s, when TBT first got the ball rolling, the concept was novel. Take a bunch of high-level hoopers, make them loosely affiliated with their college teams, and have them compete in a March Madness-style competition with a massive cash prize for the winner. On paper, the concept still\u00a0really pops. Add in unique features like the Elam Ending, and TBT was certainly a product worth watching.<\/p>\n
But 2025 feels much different from 2015, when TBT was still in its infancy and got basketball fans excited for summer hoops. The tournament now faces a crowded basketball calendar where the WNBA dominates summertime viewing, international competitions have gained more exposure, especially as those prospects make transitions to American college ball or the NBA, and the NBA\u2019s Summer League has grown a niche following<\/a> with solid viewership<\/a>.<\/p>\n Given all of that, it feels like TBT has been left behind.<\/p>\n Gone are the days where TBT games are played in front of sold out arenas in Wichita, Kansas or Dayton, Ohio. Now, a quick ticket search<\/a> for this weekend\u2019s quarterfinal games in Wichita yields front-row center court seats still available for purchase, with general admission tickets widely available for just $10. What was once an electric summer basketball event has transitioned into a made-for-TV event that few viewers even tune in for.<\/p>\n In 2024, after 10 years on ESPN, TBT made the transition to Fox Sports<\/a>, inking a multi-year agreement with the network. It\u2019s not unusual for a live sports property to take a relevance hit once it leaves ESPN\u2019s airwaves (just ask the NHL), but this felt like the death knell for TBT. Last year\u2019s TBT semifinals games on FS1 averaged just 58,500 viewers. (Viewership for the championship game on Fox was not readily available.) Those are LIV Golf-esque numbers<\/a> and show just how limited the audience for a product like this is.<\/p>\n Not only is TBT out of sight and out of mind on Fox Sports, but it\u2019s simply lost much of what made it fun in the first place. The atmosphere, as previously mentioned, plays a huge role. But it\u2019s also the alumni teams from certain colleges getting together and competing again. That seems to be happening less and less, even if teams are still branded as repping their former schools.<\/p>\n The Wichita State team, the Aftershocks, only have four players out of their 10 person roster that played any college ball for the Shockers. Only four out of 13 players from the reigning champion Carmen\u2019s Crew team actually played at Ohio State. Maryland\u2019s team, Shell Shock, has a guy that infamously flipped off their student section<\/a> while playing for Virginia Tech!<\/p>\n If your tournament is modeled off getting buy-in from alumni bases across the country, it\u2019s difficult to do that when more than half the team didn\u2019t actually play for the school, or worse, actively vilified it.<\/p>\n Anecdotally, there just hasn\u2019t been much chatter about TBT this year either. Fox Sports issued one short press release<\/a> about the tournament beginning and has promoted it on its college basketball social channels, but nothing has broken through. Financial details of TBT\u2019s deal with Fox were not disclosed, but it\u2019s hard to imagine the network will stick around long after the term of the current deal is up given the poor viewership. The $1 million winner-take-all prize pool will be hard to justify without a TV deal with a prominent national broadcaster. And without that, the tournament will lose a lot of what little luster it has left. (TBT already shrank the purse from $2 million to $1 million in 2020.)<\/p>\n TBT has had a good run, but it seems to be nearing its end. There\u2019s simply too many other summer basketball options and too little fan engagement to make it work much longer. And if John Calipari ever gets his wish, and college basketball introduces a summer season<\/a>, TBT could officially retire.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Unbelievably, The Basketball Tournament tipped off its 12th year last week. The 64-team, $1 million winner-take-all competition has…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":86480,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[44],"tags":[1339,1317,1337,1338,62,30852,58333,67,132,68],"class_list":{"0":"post-86479","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-ncaa-basketball","8":"tag-basketball","9":"tag-ncaa","10":"tag-ncaa-basketball","11":"tag-ncaabasketball","12":"tag-sports","13":"tag-tbt","14":"tag-the-basketball-tournament","15":"tag-united-states","16":"tag-unitedstates","17":"tag-us"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/114903731806005503","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/86479","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=86479"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/86479\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/86480"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=86479"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=86479"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=86479"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}