drbluejay wrote:It appears that Tournament formats have changed a lot since I was involved with coaching but I still attend most of my grandkids games and tournaments. When I coached in tournaments, we didn't even have pool play before seeding the teams.
I'm sorry if I offended anyone by hating this format.
I wish we were playing in Atlantis instead of Vegas.
Here’s more of Shatels story on NIL and the Vegas tournament. I was very inspired by our coaches and school and will definitely be donating to the Bird Club. We all should give whatever we can. It’s ridiculously easy.
Long Live The Bluejays!!!!
In or out. At Creighton, Greg McDermott is in….has been a step ahead of his competitors.
That was the case again this offseason when Mac pulled off a brilliant move to get in the Players Era Festival Nov. 26-30 in Las Vegas.
The PEF, funded by private equities, is a game-changer for college basketball. It has pledged to give $1 million to the collectives of each of the eight participating teams. That’s $1 million that those schools don’t have to ask from boosters who are suffering from donor fatigue.
Mac is in the trenches of NIL fundraising. That’s rare. Most coaches don’t fundraise for NIL — not to the degree McDermott does. But Creighton’s “Bird Club” collective needs Mac’s full effort.
“Besides being a basketball coach, I’m a full-time fundraiser,” McDermott said. “That’s the only way we’re going to survive — until it comes in-house.
“As of right now, until you have a full-time staff running a collective office, it’s going to fall on myself and others to raise the money.”
So last spring when McDermott saw that the Players Era tourney had one spot still open, he told Merfeld to look into getting Creighton in that tourney.
The problem: CU was already in the highly-coveted “Battle 4 Atlantis” tournament over Thanksgiving. The field included Arizona, Davidson, Gonzaga, Indiana, Louisville, Oklahoma, and West Virginia (Providence replaced Creighton).
It’s hard enough to get into the Atlantis tournament. But when the Players Era tourney invited Creighton, Mac and the Jays jumped.
“It took some doing,” Merfeld said. “The first conversation we had was thanks for the call but we’re fairly down the road with some other schools in filling the last spot.
“Within 24-48 hours, they called back and recognized the kind of support we had, and said we were the best choice for them, because of what Mac’s been able to do the last four or five years, having us in the top 20 and Sweet 16.”
How hard was the conversation with the Atlantis organizers?
“That was not comfortable for Mac or I,” Merfeld said. “Obviously they were not very happy with us.”
The move turned heads in the college basketball community. But once coaches and administrators saw it was for NIL, they understood. And many started calling the Players Era to get in line for next year.
“I felt bad because we made a commitment to the Bahamas,” McDermott said. “But I also can’t look my boosters in the face when I’m asking them to part with their money to support our program when I have an opportunity to get a million and say no.
“We reached out to them. They didn’t reach out to us. But we see teams drop from Maui next year to go to this tournament in Vegas. I think there will be considerably more teams. And we’ll go back.”
Merfeld said Creighton had to pay to get out of the Atlantis event. He wouldn’t disclose how much but said, “it wasn’t $1 million.”
“It was going to cost us a couple hundred thousand to go to the Bahamas,” McDermott said. “Now they (Players Era) are paying all our expenses and giving us some NIL money.
“Would I rather do some other things than spending six nights in Vegas? Probably. But the competition is going to be great and the people running it are great. It’s going to be a first-class event.”
It may not have been something McDermott imagined he would have done three years ago. But the game changes every week. It’s already different from last week.
“Change is happening,” Merfeld said. Mac’s approach is that he’s all-in. He enjoys coaching young men and he understands that to continue doing it, you have to be all-in. That’s the choice that he’s made.”
At Creighton Bob Gibson majored in sociology and starred in Basketball and Baseball. In 1957 Gibson received a $3,000 sign-on bonus with St. Louis Cardinals, but delayed his HOF Cards career a year to play pro B-ball with the Harlem Globetrotters.
)
