@Lulufulu
A separate tournament has always interested me; that was Phog Allen's solution (the NCAA) once the NIT had become an asymmetric regional dominated racket that obstructed KU and so many others from fair participation in the pursuit of "national" championships. What KU leadership now needs to do is think of the issue in similarly scaled up terms. The apparent Nike/Cal/Westley/Rose/CAA/SEC/ESPN/NCAA complex is appears to be impeding ours and others competition for a national champion, so let us leap frog and compete for a world championship of college basketball.
Part of the reason I have been bullish on the B12 expanding into the EST, is so that it could build common cause with EST schools in and outside of such an expanded B12 constructive engagement (i.e., inter league and inter time zone play).
For a separate tournament to be not just a one time boycott device, but a credible threat that might compel change, we need CST and EST schools, and preferably schools from MST and PST too. The idea is to confront the complex with a viable countervailing marketing force--a tournament truly inclusive of all parts of USA, and then from college teams from around the world--a Naismith World College Basketball Championship Tournament.
But to make it viable, we've got to engage the EST college basketball programs that are getting stiffed as badly as KU is by the current complex's running of the system.
The World University Games offer a good model but they lack a tie to Naismith and so far they are not claiming to be producing a true world champion of college basketball. Imagine a World College Basketball Championship Tournament played on Naismith Drive in Allen Field House, Sprint Center, the Round House in Wichita, Creighton's facility, maybe Oklahoma City's arena and the Octogon with the championship games being held in Allen Field House on James Naismith Court. It might be a two month tournament. It might involve several hundred college teams seeded objectively, by a consensus of state of the art statistical programs.
The advertising/PR hook would be: if you want to watch the basketball equivalent of All Star Wrestling, where the seeding and outcomes are pre-determined, watch the NCAA tournament. If you want to watch real championship basketball, watch the Naismith World College Basketball Championship....BASKETBALL AS IT WAS MEANT TO BE!!!!!
This could very quickly get bigger than anything the apparent Nike/Cal/Westley/Rose/CAA/SEC/ESPN could stop. Its called enlarging the problem to a scale where one can prevail.
We could engage Latin American, South American, European and Asian and African universities.
We could use some of the huge foreign networks to televise and distribute it, if domestic networks dragged their feet.
We could leap frog the apparent complex to attaining the global college basketball market.
Some eggs would get broken for sure.
But OUR eggs are being broken now.
Perhaps its time for some of their eggs to break, too, while college basketball quests for a new legitimacy.
The competition of these two entities would accelerate the proliferation of the game, too, as surely as the competition between the old NFL and AFL did the same for professional football.
