What is quickly becoming one of the highest-profile early season college basketball events, Players Era is now moving to ESPN.
ESPN has acquired rights to the Players Era men’s college basketball competition, which will expand to a 24-team field competing across two separate tournaments, it was announced Thursday. The Players Era men’s event previously aired on TNT Sports.
The news Thursday covered only the men’s competition, with Players Era set to announce information related to the women’s event at a later date.
Starting this year, Players Era will be comprised of an eight-team tournament the week before Thanksgiving — which this year will feature Kansas, Florida, Houston, Auburn, Notre Dame, West Virginia, Rutgers and UNLV — and a 16-team competition during Thanksgiving week. The latter will feature Michigan, St. John’s and several other marquee teams.
Last year’s Players Era men’s tournament averaged 322,000 viewers on TNT Sports, more than doubling the previous year, with viewership topping out at 1.1 million for the Michigan-Gonzaga title game.
The Players Era has drawn prominent teams away from the other marquee early season tournaments, such as the Maui Invitational — and now will presumably bump several of those events from their usual ESPN windows.
Thursday’s announcement is just the latest media rights tremor in college basketball, which is still dealing with the reverberations from Duke’s first-of-its-kind rights deal with Amazon Prime Video announced last week. Duke is set to play UConn on Prime the night before Thanksgiving, a game that seems fairly likely to compete head-to-head with a Players Era matchup on ESPN.
Another notable change coming next season is the expected expansion of the NCAA men’s and women’s basketball tournaments to 76 teams, which that change potentially being finalized as soon as Thursday, according to Pete Thamel of ESPN.
While college football generates most of the agita, college basketball is in its own state of transition amidst the widespread uncertainty facing college sports. So far, the answer has been more games involving the major conference teams.
