The 2024 preseason tournament mega-preview
Everything from Baha Mar to Sunshine Slam
Well, we’re back to everyone’s favorite: Feast Week. This has now extended beyond one week and is more like 11 days, but you won’t hear me complaining about people celebrating Thanksgiving. Beats seeing all the Christmas stuff in the stores already set out in September. Stop ignoring Halloween! Stop ignoring fall! Your Hallmark movies, which I am told are actually written by a college basketball guy, can wait.
I did this last year and it got a glowing reception, which is to say that no one replied to me on X The Everything App to give me their thoughts on vaccines. Considering I’m not above reheating an idea, especially when I have two other posts (one on JT Toppin, one on VCU’s defense) cooking in the background while the oven’s already at 350, here’s the 2024 version of a 2023 fave.
There are three things you must know ahead of time. First: I’m covering 23 of these plus a weird MTE. Rounding up to the usual 10% only the first three are free, meaning to read about the Maui Invitational and such you’ve gotta be a paid subscriber. I highly recommend doing that exact thing here. It’s $30 for a full year or $5 for a month if you don’t have $30 right now.
Second: for the tournaments that are worth fully breaking down, we’ll break the field into the following:
FAVORITES: Teams who enter with a 25% chance or better to win their tournament. (Maui excluded.)
DARKHORSES: Teams somewhere in the 10-25% range. (Maui excluded; this became 5-20%.)
UNDERDOGS: Everybody below 10%.
For tournaments with four teams, those ranges become 40%, 15-40%, and <15%.
Third: the categories this year are different. They go as follows and are, predictably, food-themed.
FIRST PLATE: The best of the best, and precisely what you want in your life this coming week-plus. (Example: Maui.)
SECOND HELPING: The best of the rest. These don’t take priority, but perhaps there’s something here that’s missing in the first group and is worth one’s time. (Example: Charleston Classic.)
LEFTOVERS: This is where you really gotta like something to get into it, because you’re already stuffed with the top two groups. And you’ve probably got to be creative in how you consume these. (Example: Cayman Islands Classic.)
FOOD POISONING: Unless you are really, truly desperate, I would not consume any of these, as they are medically inadvisable. (Example: Cancun Challenge.)
ALL ODDS LISTED ARE VIA BART TORVIK’S WEBSITE.
For TV schedules this week, I first recommend the brilliant catch-all post by Blogging the Bracket that has every single event happening. Past that, my long-time king Matt Sarzyniak puts up updated CBB schedules within minutes of the end of a game.
Just like 2023, this year’s REQUIRED PREDICTIONS BY JOURNALISTIC LAW are all randomly assigned. This is because actually attempting to predict these is, uh, hard. Very hard. So:
Go to RANDOM.org;
See what number comes up between 1 and 100;
Match that to the odds on the chart.
THESE MAY OR MAY NOT BE WHAT I PERSONALLY BELIEVE. Frankly, it’s easier than investing a lot of brain power into 10% of a team’s season.
Enough words. Onto the tourneys.
THE UNCATEGORIZABLE THING I HAVE TO START WITH
Players Era Festival
November 26 & 27 group play, November 30 championship day
This is the only MTE I will be discussing, because it’s fascinating and frankly very odd. This is the first year of Players Era Festival, which is an MTE in Las Vegas built around funneling NIL money to the eight schools involved. This is a promising-ish idea if it actually worked that way, which it won’t for long, as the NCAA issued a one-time exemption to this thing they didn’t anticipate existing. If only there was a track record of people willing to push the NCAA’s envelope.
Anyway, here is how this thing is set up. For now. I say for now because they changed the format of this event literally one month ago after already changing it twice.
The Power bracket consists of Houston, Alabama, Rutgers, and Notre Dame.
The Impact bracket consists of San Diego State, Creighton, Oregon, and Texas A&M.
After the two scheduled games on Tuesday and Wednesday, there will be a championship game on Saturday between the teams with the best point differential in each group. I think. The actual verbiage claims it caps point differential at +20 and then goes to total points scored then total points allowed. IDK.
As such there’s no way to really cap this. You could do a sort of four-team bracket, I guess, like this for each:
But this doesn’t really work, as it’s obviously not a bracket format. I guess this implies a final of Houston/Texas A&M or Houston/Creighton Alabama/Oregon or I don’t know. You have as good a guess as I do of how all of this goes. If this ends up having a second edition in 2025 (which apparently will have 18 teams) then they’ll have an entirely new leadership group.
THE BEST POSSIBLE TITLE GAME IS: …is it really Alabama/Texas A&M? Which is just an SEC conference game we’ll already see on January 11? That’s such an unsatisfying answer to me. I would personally prefer Houston/Creighton.
REQUIRED PREDICTION BY JOURNALISTIC LAW: Buddy, hopefully they just complete the event. But RANDOM.org posits Houston over Texas A&M.
Now onto more normal events.
FIRST PLATE
Baha Mar Hoops Bahamas Championship
November 21 and 22 on CBS Sports Network; Bracket
FAVORITE: Tennessee (47.2%). The joys of playing one top-25 opponent instead of two. I wrote a note on Tennessee in the watchlist this week and am interested to see how their possibly resurgent offense fares here.
DARKHORSES: Baylor (25.9%) and St. John’s (21.4%). The winner of this game collectively possesses about a 47% chance to win a final, most likely with Tennessee, which feels pretty fair.
UNDERDOGS: Virginia (5.5%). I’m not sure that anything would have helped here even if Tony Bennett had come back. Intriguing to me is that UVA is 3-0 and has shot 45% from three but has gotten demolished on the boards, has a negative TO margin, and has the 155th-best 2PT% against the 325th-toughest schedule. I have doubts.
THE BEST POSSIBLE TITLE GAME IS: Pretty obviously anything involving Tennessee and not Virginia, but I’ll go out on a limb and pick Tennessee/St. John’s as the best possible battle. I would be fascinated to see two very defense-heavy backcourts battle, and it’s not like we have many years left to see Rick Pitino and Rick Barnes battle each other. It would be their first meeting since 1996…also at a preseason tournament.
REQUIRED PREDICTION BY JOURNALISTIC LAW: St. John’s over Tennessee in the final.
Greenbrier Tip-Off, Mountain Division
November 21 and 22 on CBS Sports Network; Bracket
FAVORITE: None! I love it!
DARKHORSES: The entire field. This is as tight a four-team event as we’ve had in a while. Everyone is between 18-36% to win it, which does make Pitt the nominal favorite but in the sense that they only win this in one out of every three simulations or thereabouts. Meanwhile UCF wins it in about one out of every five or six. That’s not a huge difference.
UNDERDOGS: N/A.
THE BEST POSSIBLE TITLE GAME IS: I think that any of the four prospective finals here is entertaining. That’s a real rarity for any tournament, which is why this gets top billing for me. Very good bracketing by all involved. I think by a hair, I would pick Wisconsin/Pittsburgh as the final I’m looking forward to most, but the chaos final of LSU/UCF would be a blast as well. Into pretty much everything, though the least-appetizing is probably Wisconsin/LSU.
REQUIRED PREDICTION BY JOURNALISTIC LAW: Wisconsin over Pittsburgh.
BEHIND THE WALL ($): The other 21