A college basketball tournament in Vegas pays players, and shakes up the sport

LAS VEGAS — Back in 1987, Bruce Pearl thought he’d found basketball paradise: Maui.

The Maui Invitational, specifically — college basketball’s premier early-season tournament for the better part of 40 years. Pearl, an Iowa assistant then, loved the waves, the sand, the small community center gym. But most of all, he loved that every watchful eye across the college basketball universe was, for one week, trained on the same tiny tournament in the middle of the Pacific.

“I’m an old-school guy, so goodness gracious, I walk into Lahaina (Civic Center) and I get emotional,” said Pearl, the recently retired Auburn coach who won the event with the Tigers last November. “You dream that one day, as a head coach, you might coach in Maui.”

Or, at least you used to.

But today, Maui and other long-established multi-team events like the Battle 4 Atlantis are facing an existential threat. This week’s Players Era Festival in Las Vegas pays players directly — at least $1 million combined per team in name, image and likeness deals. The tournament doesn’t disclose how player payouts are determined, but they will go through NIL Go, the compliance clearinghouse launched by the College Sports Commission and managed by the accounting firm Deloitte.

In just its second season, the tournament has made schools question the alternative of spending hundreds of thousands on Thanksgiving week trips to faraway islands, especially in an era dominated by dollars and sense.

“These kids are like professional athletes,” said Lea Miller-Tooley, the CEO of Complete Sports Management and a longtime event organizer who also founded Battle 4 Atlantis in 2011. “They don’t care about swimming with dolphins. They wanna get paid.”

After its debut with eight teams went off without a hitch last season, Players Era has expanded to 18 teams — eight of which are currently ranked in the Top 25 — before swelling to 32 next season. With over $50 million in payouts already secured over the next two seasons, according to founder Seth Berger, teams are understandably lining up for a piece of the pie.

Perhaps it’s no wonder, then, that this season’s field is a veritable Sweet 16 preview. All of No. 3 Houston, No. 7 Michigan, No. 8 Alabama, No. 12 Gonzaga, No. 14 St. John’s, No. 15 Iowa State, No. 17 Tennessee, No. 21 Auburn and recently ranked Kansas have descended on Sin City this week, along with hundreds of credentialed media members and NBA scouts.

Maui, by comparison, has one Top 25 team in No. 23 NC State. The Battle 4 Atlantis has only No. 24 Vanderbilt.

Bruce Pearl and the Auburn Tigers won the Maui Invitational last season. (Marco Garcia / Imagn Images)

Players Era is financially backed by RedBird IMI: a joint media venture between the private equity firm RedBird Capital Partners and the Abu Dhabi-based International Media Investments. Last season, for all the attention on the actual games in Las Vegas, there was arguably more focus on Dec. 5, the day payments were supposed to hit.

But once they did, apprehension about Players Era seeming too-good-to-be-true dissipated. While skepticism may remain in some corners, on Monday, the Big 12 and Players Era announced a five-year equity deal, guaranteeing the Big 12 eight slots each season, with Players Era paying players on those teams over $50 million through 2030.

Signs promoting the event, which also includes a four-team women’s tournament, are everywhere along the Strip, from cardstock cutouts littered throughout casinos to flashing electronic billboards on the side of the MGM Grand, which houses one of the two gyms being used this week. Gamblers wearing Iowa State and Gonzaga jerseys are easy to spot despite the event being sandwiched between an F1 race and Thanksgiving.

Some in college basketball say the three biggest events this season are March Madness, conference tournaments … and Players Era.

“This,” said Berger, who also founded basketball apparel company AND1 in the ’90s, “will be the best college basketball tournament ever outside of March.”

Asked what other tournaments can do to survive, Kansas coach Bill Self didn’t mince words.

“I would say that it would be up to the organizers, and the event promoters, to see if they can do whatever the Players Era is doing,” Self said. “I don’t think they’re in danger — unless maybe they don’t make some adjustments.”

In 2023, Berger set out to create a tournament that rewarded players directly. He knew he needed a substantial program to be first on board, especially if he was going to attract the level of competition necessary to upset long-established nonconference scheduling norms. After a few early conversations, Houston was interested — but wanted more information about the financial piece. How, after all, was Players Era actually going to come up with all this money?

“Anytime you’re doing something new, people should be skeptical,” Berger said. “In fairness to them, I would’ve been skeptical myself.”

So Berger set up a meeting with Houston coach Kelvin Sampson and Berger’s co-founder Ian Orefice, the founder of production company EverWonder Studio with ties to RedBird IMI.

“He got comfortable, ultimately, that the million dollars were going to be there,” Berger said, “and honestly, once coach Sampson said yes, the other dominoes fell very quickly.”

Six of the other seven teams from last season’s inaugural event, including Alabama and San Diego State, are back this year. But it’s the heft of the programs Berger added for Year Two — including Kansas, Gonzaga, Tennessee and St. John’s — that has shot Players Era straight into a different stratosphere. Berger said that 26 of next season’s 32 teams have already signed on, with Louisville, Florida and Virginia as some of the latest brand-name additions.

Berger said next season’s 32-team field — the format he anticipates for Players Era for the foreseeable future — will feature eight four-team pools that compete over the two or so weeks leading up to Thanksgiving week, also known as Feast Week. Then, the best of each pool will fly to Vegas for an eight-team bracket to crown an ultimate champion. That means even the teams that don’t qualify for the Las Vegas portion still receive three high-quality nonconference games to bolster their NCAA Tournament resumes. Under the new format, not every team will receive $1 million, according to CBS Sports.

The flashy fields and eye-popping numbers around Players Era have only made the event’s contrast to legacy tournaments that much more pronounced.

Coaches and staffers The Athletic polled who have previously participated in Maui and Atlantis say that with charter flights, hotels, meals and other fees — few, if any, of which are covered by event organizers — it can cost a program anywhere from $250,000 to $750,000 to attend. One school, which has participated in both events in years past, said it has cost as much as a million dollars to play in those events, given growing travel parties.

Other tournaments often book fields well in advance, making it harder to determine the quality of games for teams looking to build NCAA Tournament resumes.

“It’s just not as sensible, as special as those tournaments have been,” said one high-major staffer who deals with scheduling, granted anonymity in exchange for his candor.

Players Era does not directly compensate schools, but in the revenue sharing era, that $1 million payout — or more, if a team advances to the championship or third-place game — still dramatically aids schools’ bottom lines.

Tom Valdiserri, the executive vice president and managing director of KemperSports, the organizing body that hosts both the Maui Invitational and Battle 4 Atlantis, said there’s nothing off the table as far as altering those events. That includes possible format changes, and even adjusting the events’ compensation models.

Valdiserri also noted that Maui celebrated its 40-year anniversary event last season — a tremendous success, especially in the tournament’s return to Maui after devastating wildfires — and that there’s “no end in sight” to its television agreement with ESPN.

“I’m not going to speculate on any other event, but we’ve just seen in history that they come and go,” Valdiserri said, “and there’s been a couple that have stood the test of time.”

Players Era may be the biggest single threat to tournaments like Maui and Atlantis, but it’s far from the only one, including one from the NCAA itself.

In June, the NCAA passed legislation that changed a longtime scheduling rule. Under the previous setup, schools were permitted to play the maximum 32 games only if they participated in a multi-team event; otherwise, their regular-season schedules were capped at 31 games. But as of the 2026-27 season, all schools will be permitted to schedule 32 games, cutting out much of the necessity of multi-team events.

After over a decade of organizing the Battle 4 Atlantis, Miller-Tooley left this offseason to focus on what she sees becoming the new “focal point” of nonconference scheduling: marquee neutral-site games.

“They’re getting the compensation. They can control their schedule. And they know exactly who they’re going to play,” Miller-Tooley said, adding that some of the neutral-site contests she’s organizing have come together in as little as a week.

The goal for any neutral-site nonconference game is to come close to a home gate, which ranges anywhere from $500,000 to $1 million on average for Top 25 teams, according to U.S. Department of Education data and multiple program staffers. But depending on a school’s brand — and venue, and location — it’s possible certain neutral-site games become more profitable than home games.

This week alone, Duke plays Arkansas in Chicago, North Carolina plays Michigan State in Fort Myers, Fla., and UConn plays Illinois in Madison Square Garden in New York.

“We have as many alums in Atlanta as we do in Auburn — in fact more,” said Pearl, who is calling Players Era as an analyst on TNT. “We go to Birmingham and we have more alums there. So I love the regional neutral sites.”

Therein lies another hidden detriment, according to multiple high-major staffers and coaches, of going to an event like Maui or Atlantis. Not only are teams spending hundreds of thousands of dollars to go play these games, but in doing so, there’s also the opportunity cost of not playing home games or lucrative neutral-site deals. Hypothetically, say a school pays $500,000 to go to the Maui Invitational for a week. That isn’t its only cost; it’s also the additional $1 million it could’ve earned by playing two home games, or the additional $1.5 million it could’ve earned by playing a standalone neutral site.

That only exacerbates the financial strain on athletic departments that, more than ever, are desperate for cash to keep up with their rivals.

“College sports has never been more of an arms race,” Miller-Tooley said. “Teams want to play neutral-site games that they’re going to get paid (for).”

Asked this week about Houston’s participation, Sampson was abundantly clear about why the Cougars are in Las Vegas.

“We had no choice. Have you seen our budget? Have you seen our fundraising? We have to raise our money,” Sampson said. “I had to get our administration to understand how important it was to follow through on the decision I made to be in this tournament. Sign the forms. Sign them today. ‘Well, we’re not quite sure …’ It doesn’t matter.”

Berger said Players Era is profitable this year — through a combination of ticket sales, sponsorships and television partnerships — with room for growth in coming seasons. While some skepticism may linger about the tournament long term, the more teams join, and the more it becomes a staple of the November nonconference slate, the more optimistic Berger is about the future.

“(There’s a) number of teams we have who have said to us, we’re building our Quad-1 schedule moving forward around Players Era,” Berger said, “as opposed to fitting in Players Era.”

As for what becomes of Maui? Of Atlantis? Of the non-paying multi-team event structure in general, one that ruled college basketball’s November slate until last season?

Nobody knows — because nobody ever saw the current landscape coming, either.

“My heart actually does break for Maui. After the fires, Maui economically needed that event,” Pearl said. “But no, I see the future of the Maui Invitational really changing. … The best teams are going to find tournaments to play against the other best teams.”